Retrospection in Korean

Abstract

It is argued in Sohn (1974) that Korean verbal suffixes like the honorific -si, the formal aeferential -sup, and the performative elements such as -ta(reportive) and -kka(question) are all underlyingly transitive sentences with the speaker or hearer as the agent. The present paper is an attempt to push the frontier forward and reveal some fundamental semantic properties (the semantic structure, the semantic units, and the interactions of these units) associated with the retrospective suffix.