LINGUIST List 15.1014

Fri Mar 26 2004

Qs: Korean Exclusion Particles;Semitic Plural Acq

Editor for this issue: Naomi Fox <foxlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Alan Hyun-Oak Kim, Exclusion Particles ONLY in Cleft Constructions
2. nesreen nawwab, requist for review

Dear Linguists:

Of the two lexical items typically used as focus markers for exclusion
in Korean, MAN and PPUN (equivalent to the English ONLY), the latter
occurs always in the pre-copular position of cleft sentences, and the
other elsewhere, as shown in (1).

(1)	a.	Minho-nun mayki-MAN cap-a-ss-ta.
		Minho-TOP catfish-only caught
		'Minho caught only catfish.'

b.	Minho-ka cap-un-kes-un mayki-PPUN-i-ta.
Minho-NOM caught thing-TOP catfish-only be
'All that Minho caught were catfish.'
		'What Minho caught were only catfish.'

In appearance, as the English translations show, one does not see any
significant contrast between (1a) and (1b), except for foregrounding
of ''only catfish'' in a pseudo-cleft construction of (1b), although a
similar effect may also be achieved simply by stressing 'only' in
(1a).

Most native speakers of Korean would consider (1a) somewhat odd, for
it sounds as if Minho had a magic hand and caught catfish selectively
in the premeditated fashion by eliminating all other kinds of
fish. For a normal interpretation 'all the fish John caught that
afternoon were catfish and nothing else,' a Korean speaker would
prefer (1b) to (1a). I find this rather puzzling. Why should there be
two distinct lexemes for ONLY in Korean, while English does the job
just fine with a single 'only'?

One other property associated with PPUN is the feature of recurrence,
as seen in Minho's repetitive catching action in the example. In this
conjunction, Japanese also seems to make this sort of distinction of
ONLY. Consider (2a) and (2b) below.

2.	a.	Nyuuintyuu-no boku-wo Naomi-DAKE-ga mimai-ni kit-te kure-ta.
		hospitalized I-TOP Naomi-only-NOM visit-come-give-PAST
		'Only Naomi visited me at the hospital.'

	b.	Nyuuintyuu-no boku-wo Naomi-BAKARI-ga mimai-ni kit-te kure-ta.
		hospitalized I-TOP Naomi-only-NOM visit-come-give-PAST
		'The only person who visited me at the hospital was Naomi.'

In (2b) with BAKARI, only Naomi repeatedly visited the hospitalized
speaker, whereas the DAKE sentence (2a) is ambiguous in the sense that
either Naomi was the only person who knows the speaker was
hospitalized and made repeated visits or everyone at work knew the
speaker in the hospital and no one but Naomi showed up. The contrast
between DAKE and BAKARI in Japanese is very similar to the Korean
MAN/PPUN opposition, although BAKARI has no restriction in
distribution, unlike its PPUN counterpart. I refer to the type of
exclusion lexeme PPUN (BAKARI in Japanese) for the sake of convenience
as a marker for 'inductive exclusion' or 'post factum exclusion' in
Kim (2003).

I am just curious to see any other languages that make such a
distinction as in Korean and Japanese. Your help is most appreciated.


Reference

Kim, Alan Hyun-Oak. 2003. Functional specialization of Exclusion
Particles: Korean man/ppun and Japanese dale/bakari. In Explorations
in Korean Language and Linguistics. Seoul: Hankook Publishing
Co. 133-66.

Subject-Language: Korean; Code: KKN 

I'm working on my ph.D on the acquisition of plurals in Arabic. I
would like to review similar research studies, with special refference
to related psycholinguistic theories explaining the process of
development, experimental studies and elicitation techniques for
testing childern production and comprehension of plurals in semitic
languages or English.