A Suspicious Analysis of the Suspective Morpheme and its Homonyms
Seok Choong Song · 어학연구 · 1975
Homonymy is a common phenomenon in language and many great writers have adroit~,qy exploited it for various literary effects. It is a source of puns and it can be a great fun for those who can juggle words to have a large number of homophonous words at ,their finger tips, or on their tongue tips, to be more precise. Funny sentences containing homophonous words may not be entertaining to a linguist who is trying to present a ' simple and consistent description of these forms. Homonymy of lexical morphemes is less ' of a problem, for the context and other extra-sentential features often contribute to dis ambiguate these elements but the homonymy of grammatical forms, such as case markers and verbal endings, without similar clues, can give a linguist fits. To further aggravate ,'the situation, we do not have a clear-cut criterion to depend upon to unequivocally distin,guish a case of homonymy from one of polysemy. I will not indulge in theoretical : speculations on descriptive procedures to deal with the problem nor on the justification ,of principles involved in such methodological considerations in this paper. Instead, I will ' simply employ a heuristic approach utilizing currently available descriptive apparatus re,gatdless of its theoretical persuasion. The aim of this paper is to clarify a confusion in ,descriptions of certain hon;tophonous items in Korean, thus sharpening our insight into ,the structure of the language rather than milking an attempt to refine the descriptive , methodology. Like many other languages, Korean abounds in homonyms and some of them, one syI'}able grammatical morphemes, in particular, present truly knotty and frustrating problems : to a linguist if he attempts ' to describe the underlying grammatical system of what appears to be the enormously complex and complicated linguistic behavior of native speakers. ~ have chosen one item, namely, ci for an illustration, and will show kinds of problems