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위혜경 한국언어학회 2007 언어 Vol.32 No.4

Ambiguity of Response Particles to Negative Utterances in Korean and English

위혜경 서울대학교 언어교육원 2019 語學硏究 Vol.55 No.3

This study explores the ambiguity of Korean response particles (RP) ung ‘yes’ and ani ‘no’ responding to long form negation (LFN), in comparison to the ambiguity of RPs to the so-called “high negation” and “low negation” in English. The results show that i) the ambiguity of Korean LFN is due to two possible interpretations, i.e., pragmatic and literal, ii) Korean RPs are anaphors, supporting Krifka’s (2013) propositional anaphoric approach to English RPs, but iii) they refer to only one antecedent from the preceding proposition, that is, for the outermost NegP only, for both SFN (short form negation) and LFN. In contrast, the ambiguity of English high negation is two-fold. One type of ambiguity is due to the two possible interpretations of high negation, pragmatic versus literal, just like Korean; the other type of ambiguity occurs within the literal meaning of high negation and is due to the availability of multiple antecedents, just like with English low negation.

극성의문문의 초점

위혜경 한국언어정보학회 2022 언어와 정보 Vol.26 No.2

This squib investigates the semantic value, discourse context, syntactic structure and prosody of a polar question with a focus (F-polQ) in Korean, e.g., JONF-i oassni? ‘Did JOHNF come?’, which has not been paid much attention to. First we observe that in generating an alternative set, an F-polQ goes with a focused declarative sentence (F-Decl) on the one hand, and in that its ordinary semantic value is the set of positive and negative propositions, {p, ￢p}, it goes with an ordinary polar question on the other. Based on this, this study shows that i) the alternative set of propositions generated by an F-polQ refers to the presupposed wh-question, just like an F-Decl does, and that ii) whereas the wh-Question that provides a proper context for an occurrence of a F-Decl originates from the hearer part, forming a question-answer dialogue, the wh-Question generated by a F-polQ, indicated by the prosody of L- phrase accent, originates from the speaker part. Additionally, it is suggested that the rising boundary tone H% indicates the source of the wh-question presupposed by the F-polQ is the speaker herself.

An Analysis of Verum Focus in Commitment Space

위혜경 한국생성문법학회 2023 생성문법연구 Vol.33 No.4

This squib aims to provide a formal dynamic speech act analysis of the so-called Verum Focus (VF) as a polarity focus serving as an answer to a polar alternative question (PAQ). It is claimed that PAQs are the antecedents needed for licensing VFs contra Goodhue (2018), who argues for contrasting polar propositions as the antecedents for VF. Based on this, this study attempts to show how question-answer congruence for a pair of PAQ and VF can be analyzed in Krifka’s (2015, 2017, 2021, etc.) Commitment Space approach. The Commitment Space approach is a dynamic context update system for the speech acts of questions and answers. It is an extended framework of the classical model of Common Ground (Stalnaker 1978) that can deal with declarations only.

Function of Focus as the Semantic Predicate

위혜경 한국영어학회 2004 영어학 Vol.4 No.4

This study proposes an analysis for focus that can reflect a long-lasting intuition, i.e., the idea that focus functions as a predicate, that started from Paul (1880) and has been found in an array of researches including Lambrecht (1994), Krifka (1999), Rullman (1994), Jackendoff (1972), and Chomsky (1971). The analysis adopts wee (1999) that incorporates the idea that focus can secretly change the semantic subject-predicate structure of a sentence, yielding a propositional content possibly different from the surface default proposition, following Prague linguists such as Peregrin (1995) and Sgall et al (1986), as opposed to the major theories of focus developed by post-MG semanticists (e.g. Rooth 1985, Partee 1991, Krifka 1991). It is shown that the meaning of focus occurring in combination of focus sensitive operators can be explained by the interaction of the general meaning of free focus and the meaning of focus sensitive operator.

Information Structure of English Middles

위혜경 한국영어학회 2006 영어학 Vol.6 No.3

Wee, Hae-Kyung Wee 2006. Information Structure of English Middles. Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 6-3, 597-614. This study proposes a discourse and semantic analysis for English Middle constructions that can incorporate the semantic properties that h·ave been found in various researches: i) English middles usually require modification such as an adverb, focus, or modal expression. ii) Middle constructions are generic statements that depict inherent permanent properties of the subject NPs by an inidividual-level predication. iii) Generic operator quantifies over the event expressed by the predicate of the middle sentence. It is shown that an interaction of the pragmatic information structure and the sentential semantic condition yield a proper interpretation of the English middles. The proper semantic interpretation is obtained by the well-formed semantic structure combined with an analysis of focus, incorporating generic quantification over the event.

Anaphoricity of Ellipsis

위혜경 한국영어학회 2015 영어학 Vol.15 No.3

Wee, Hae-Kyung. 2015. Anaphoricity of Ellipsis. Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 15-3, 511-535. This study explores Merchant's (2001, 2004, 2008) Island Repair approach for VPE and sluicing and attempts to show its problems, by critically reviewing the notions of i) MaxElide and ii) Scope parallelism between the antecedent clause and the focus structure of the elided clause suggested by Merchant. This study thereby confirms the necessity of a semantic consideration for a proper explanation of the anaphoric difference between VPE and Sluicing. A supplementary argumentation is provided for Event Semantics account proposed by Wee (2015), which claims for the event semantic difference between the two elliptical constructions. (Dankook University)

A Semantic Account of Matrix Scope of a wh-phrase in a wh-island in Korean and English

위혜경 한국영어학회 2019 영어학 Vol.19 No.4

This study investigates possibility of matrix scope interpretation of a wh-phrase occurring in a wh-island clause, with two types of predicates in Korean, i.e., alta ‘know’ and kwungkumhata ‘wonder’, in comparison to its English counterpart where a wh-phrase is extracted from a wh-island. It is shown that i) in the out-of-the-blue context, alta does not readily allow matrix scope of an embedded wh-phrase in Korean whereas know allows extraction of a wh-phrase out of the embedded wh-clause in English, but in a proper context, Korean also allows a wh-phrase to have the matrix scope interpretation just like English, ii) different acceptabilities of the interrogatives with a degree wh-phrase occurring in a wh-island with these two verbs in Korean can be accounted for by the semantic analysis proposed for English by Abrusan (2014), which is based on different satisfactions of exhaustifiability conditions resulting from different semantic properties of the two verbs, and iii) due to different semantic and presuppositional properties of know and wonder, know more strictly prohibits a wh-phrase from having the matrix scope out of an embedded wh-clause than wonder not only for degree wh-phrases but also for non-degree wh-phrases.

Information Structure and Voice Mismatch in VP Ellipsis

위혜경 한국영어학회 2022 영어학 Vol.22 No.-

This study explores Korean and English voice mismatch effect in Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) and analyzes them based on Kertz’s (2013) information structural (IS) account. Kertz’s account for varying judgements on acceptability of voice mismatched VPE in English is that a voice mismatched VPE is judged unacceptable when the subject, the default topic, of the VPE clause is not in a well-formed contrastive topic (CT) relation with that of the antecedent clause. We test the validity of Kertz’s CT-based IS account for Korean mismatched VPE and additionally investigate whether another informational category, contrastive focus (CF) plays a role for voice mismatch effect in Korean. We found that (i) the judgement difference between the acceptability of ill-formed CT-relations and that of non-CT relations is relatively small in Korean, compared to English cases; (ii) even non-CT relation cases are not judged perfectly grammatical, which suggests that mismatch cases yield a certain degree of grammatical degradation regardless of the status of the information structure; (iv) nonetheless, in general, Kertz’s CT-based IS account is also valid for Korean voice-mismatched VPE; and (iv) finally, what affects the acceptability of the voice mismatched VPE the most in Korean is non-parallelism between the topic-comment structures resulting from an ill-formed CT relation, but not any other IS non-parallelism such as a non-parallel contrastive focus relation.

Context for Interpretations for Numeral

위혜경 한국언어정보학회 2017 언어와 정보 Vol.21 No.1

A numeric expression can be interpreted in various ways. The two most prominent meanings are so-called ‘exactly’ reading and ‘at least’ reading. Focusing on two approaches, the neo-Grician view (e.g. Horn 1972; van Rooij et al. 2006; Atlas and Levinson 1981; Levinson 1983) and the ambiguity view (Geurts 2006; Spector 2013) among various semantic pragmatic accounts of these two meanings, this study supports the grammatical ambiguity proposed by Spector and attempts to show that it should be supplemented by the notion of information structure of the sentence, which encodes the focus structure or newness/givenness of the information expressed by the sentence where a numeral expression occurs. Specifically, it is shown that ‘at least‘ reading is the default interpretation, and the ‘exactly’ reading is licensed by one of the three possible ways, i.e., i) by a pitch accent with no contextual information, ii) by the QUD (question under discussion in the sense of Roberts 1996) of the immediate context, or iii) by the QUD inherited from the prior context.