존재구문 ‘-어 있다’와 연쇄동사 = The Existential Construction ‘-a issta’ and Serial Verbs

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The existential construction consists of a verb and issta, where the verb is a complement of issta. Previous studies have proposed several conditions on the complement verb: i) It describes a telic situation, ii) it has a result state reading, iii) it describes an achievement situation, or iv) it is not a transitive verb. However, the studies face three types of problematic data. One is the construction where the complement verb describes an existential state that is neither telic, a result state, nor an achievement. The other is the construction that has a transitive verb. The third type is a new type of data, the construction where the complement of issta is a serial verb construction. A serial verb construction has a complex argument structure and a complex event structure. The present study proposes a lexical approach where the lexical semantics, argument structure and event structure of the existential verb issta play key roles. And the study shows that this approach can not only account for problematic data for the previous studies, but it can also explain the existential construction of serial verbs. A big advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t require any grammatical conditions other than the lexical properties of the existential verb.