비이동적 ‘來’의 의미 기능과 화용적 분석 — ‘NP+來+VP’ 구조를 중심으로

초록

The modern Chinese verb ‘来’, originally associated with spatial movement, is widely attested in non-motion uses where its lexical meaning is substantially bleached. Building on previous research and a comparative analysis of discourse data, this study addresses two related questions: what core function non-motion 来 performs, and how this function is pragmatically realized according to the person of the subject in the ‘NP+来+VP’ construction. The analysis indicates that non-motion ‘来’ performs two closely related discourse-pragmatic functions. One is to highlight the VP action as the primary task in the discourse, and the other is to assign responsibility for this action to the participant expressed by the subject NP. In this study, these functions are labeled agenda foregrounding and responsibility binding, and they are proposed as the central functions of non-motion ‘来’. This paper collectively refers to the various pragmatic forms of responsibility binding presented in different person-subject contexts as “attribution of liability”. Responsibility binding depends on the subject’s person. When the subject is first-person, the construction attributes responsibility to the speaker, often indicating initiative or voluntary task acceptance. With second-person subjects, responsibility is directed toward the addressee, often in contexts of assignment, prompting, or pressure. By contrast, third-person subjects describe responsibility allocation from an observer’s perspective rather than through direct interaction. Overall, ‘来’ serves to make responsibility relations explicit in discourse, showing how Modern Chinese linguistically organizes the attribution of responsibility among participants.

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