On Subjunctives in Korean: Exploiting a Bilingual Corpus

Abstract

This paper provides a corpus study on subjunctives in Korean in a way of comparative semantics. The whole arguments of this paper are bolstered by distributional evidence taken from naturally occurring bitexts (i.e. a bilingual corpus), in which one sentence in a language is aligned with one translation in the other language. Since previous studies regard past tense morphology as the main component to express irrealis and uncertainty, this paper accordingly checks out whether the past tense morpheme ess in Korean is also responsible for conveying the meaning of subjunctives. My finding is that the past tense morpheme ess is a sufficient condition for forming subjunctives in Korean. The current corpus study verifies that the past tense morpheme is not obligatorily used in present conditional counterfactuals in Korean, unlike English. Yet, if \ess\ is used and the antecedent denotes a present situation, the conditional sentence can only be interpreted as conveying counterfactuality. On the other hand, wish constructions in Korean, irrespective of the semantic tense, often contain the past tense morpheme. Hence, this work substantiates Iatridou (2000)'s theory of `fake past tense' is applicable to Korean subjunctives. The present corpus study, additionally, reveals that a conditional marker telamyen is a component of expressing past counterfactuals in Korean.