Predicate Types and the Tense Marker -ess in Korean

Abstract

The tense morpheme -ess has been traditionally called a past tense marker in Korean linguistics. Despite this, it is compatible with either past time adverbials or speech- time-oriented ones. This may cause difficulty in dealing with -ess. After reviewing the previous treatments of –ess, specifically focusing on the view of -ess as a past tense marker and the view of -ess as an aspect marker, I claim that neither of them is sufficient to account for the distribution of -ess. As an alternative way, I argue in this paper that the grammatical function of -ess is dependent upon the nature of predicate types it is associated with-i.e. what types of predicates are combined with -ess plays an important role in predicting the meaning of -ess in a sentence. This might assist in understanding the grammatical function of -ess systematically, along with its semantics.