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Lexical typological patterns and its factor of Korean ‘meokta(먹다)’, Chinese ‘chi(吃)’, and Japanese ‘taberu(食べる)’

  • Korean Semantics
  • 2022, 76(), pp.1-26
  • Publisher : The Society Of Korean Semantics
  • Research Area : Humanities > Korean Language and Literature
  • Received : February 10, 2022
  • Accepted : June 13, 2022
  • Published : June 30, 2022

Sunhyo Kim 1

1私立中國文化大學

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study examined lexical typology and its factors of Korean ‘meokta(먹다)’, Chinese ‘chi(吃)’, and Japanese ‘taberu(食べる)’ based on meaning expansion and syntactic structure. Their meta-verb EAT consists of the etic meaning that is the most prototypical meaning and the emic meaning that has been expanded from the etic meaning. EAT can be divided into six types. After analyzing corpus data, EAT meaning was expanded in the order of 'Korean > Chinese > Japanese'. And there was a clear difference in the distribution. The Korean ‘meokta’ has the most diverse meaning, but the Japanese ‘taberu’ was only used to have a prototypical meaning. Because of the diachronic factor, the semantic expansion and distribution of each language have very different phenomena. Korean ‘meokta’ have been diachronically maintained their form and meaning, but Chinese ‘chi’ was changed from ‘shi(食)’ during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Most of all, the Japanese ‘taberu’ changed from humble word to ordinary word in modern language. Consequently, it can be seen that diachronic factor has a big influence on meaning expansion.

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