부치사(adposition)의 기능 - 유형론의 관점에서 -

Abstract

This paper tries to examine the functions of adpositions from the typological perspective. Nine different languages including Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, English, German, French, Spanish, and Russian are surveyed for this research. Below are some new observations. (a) Adpositions have three different functions: syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. While some languages contain just two of these functions (syntactic and semantic), other languages like Korean and Japanese contain all three functions. Besides indicating the case, syntactic adpositions also contribute to conjoin both nouns and clauses. Semantic adpositions are used to express various lexical and grammatical meanings besides the case. Pragmatic meanings, such as the speaker's emotions or honorific relations, are represented by pragmatic adpositions in Korean and Japanese. (b) The case of human language can be indicated by word orders, inflectional endings, and adpositions. The difference in amount of cases that these three types can express is represented in the scale of inclusion: adposition 그 inflectional ending 그 word order'. The priority of selecting the core case by these three types is word order > inflectional ending > adposition. (c) The case hierarchy can be postulated on the basis of the three types of case indication: nominative > accusative > dative > genitive, ablative, *locative, instrumental > comitative, purposive, allative, perlative, comparative'. While the cases located to the right have a tendency to be represented by adposition, the cases located to the left tend to be indicated by word order and inflectional ending.