2010, Vol.31, No.

Korean Semantics 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.11

pISSN : 1226-7198 / eISSN : 2734-0171
https://journal.kci.go.kr/semantics

This study illustrates the information structure of double nominative constructions in Korean. In previous studies, the first NP of the constructions is usually called Topic or Focus. In this paper, however, I argue that there is no fixed information structure of double nominative constructions in Korean, except that class-member type, among the four types of double nominative constructions, has the fixed information structure. I also argue that the first NP in the double nominative constructions of class-member type is Topic, and the second NP is Focus. There are much evidence that can support my argument. First, the first NP of this type satisfies the condition of aboutness. Second, the first NP of class-member type of double nominative constructions does not fall in the scope of negation, which is one of the well-known properties of Topic. Third, the semantic relationship between the first and the second NP of this type matches with contrastive meaning of Focus. Fourth, It is well-known that in a sentence in which the subject is focus and the predicate is an individual-level one, the subject NP bears exhaustivity, which is the case of the second NP of class-member type. Fifth, whereas the first NP of this type can’t be transformed to clefted constituent of the cleft sentence, the second NP can. Sixth, the second NP can be represented with prominence while the first NP can’t. Last but not least, the first NP can’t be new information in question-answer pairs.

The goal of this paper is to analyze semantic characteristics of the information referential expressions (hereafter IRE) used in internet communication and to present a explicit property of the information on the internet. To undertake this study, the data were collected from the internet portals, Naver, Daum and Yahoo. The subject and rationale for this research are as follows: First, IRE consists of content and additional meanings. Second, additional meanings of IRE are popularity/ time/ emotion/ oneself expression and so on. Of these, popularity and time expression are used frequently. Third, I can present the property of the information on the internet through the additional meanings. For instance, the popular property of information is emphasized through popularity expression, [RECOMMENDATION], [RANKING], [FREQUENCY] and so on. The latest property of information is emphasized through time expression, [PRESENT], [NEWEST] and so on. The results of this study can be showed language expressions related to the information society.

The main concern of this paper is to look into what the match between the structure and meaning in ‘deul'-marked noun phrases in Korean is. While we basically follow the position that makes generalization about the meaning of ‘deul' phrases as ‘sum’, contrasting it with ‘group’ meaning of bare noun phrases, according to Link(1983), this paper also argues that the stages of generation is more important in interpreting the meaning of ‘deul'-marked phrases correctly. In this process ‘deul' functions as an individuator of a group. To show this, we discuss examples from three different types of noun phrases, namely collective noun phrases, material noun phrases, and noun phrases in generic sentences.