City University of Hong Kong Dep
Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics
Research Seminar
Korean Exclusive Particle '-man' and
Focus Extension
Presented by
Professor Jae-Woong Choe
Department of Linguistics, Korea University (Seoul, Korea)
Date: 23 April 2007, Monday
Time: 4:30pm - 6:00pm
Venue: B7603 (Lift 3, 7/F, Blue Zone),Academic Building,CityU
Abstract
The delimiter or exclusive particle '-man' in Korean has traditionally been considered to mark the focus whose 'sister members', are crucial in explicating the meaning of the whole sentence. In this presentation, I will show that the selection of alternatives does not always depend on the '-man' marked constituent, and will argue for a concept of focus extension, largely drawing on my previous works. Main support for such a concept comes from various kinds of surface distribution of the exhaustive particle '-man' and some related ambiguity with respect to the focus. I also discuss a more complicated case where the particle seems to act as a scope marker, but claim that the concept of focus extension can also be applied to it. In the rest of the presentation, I will consider some implications of the focus extension to a recent discussion on scopal interaction involving the particle and also to a discussion on some interesting relationship between wh-questions and their prosody.
Speaker
Jae-Woong Choe, received his Ph. D. in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1987. His dissertation title was "Anti-quantifiers and a theory of distributivity." Areas of his research are formal semantics, formal pragmatics, and some theoretical aspects of computational linguistics. Topics of his recent interest include Korean delimiters, speech acts, and classification of adjectives and verbs. He served as president of the Korean Society for Language and Information and also as editor of the Korean Journal of Linguistics. He teaches semantics, pragmatics, and computational linguistics in the Department of Linguistics, Korea University.
