부정문의 중의성과 모호성 = Ambiguity and Vagueness of the Negative Sentences in Korean

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In the first national textbook of Korean grammar, published in 1985, it was mentioned that the plural interpretations of negative sentences are derived from ‘ambiguity’. Afterwards all the textbooks of Korean grammar and almost every Korean academic grammar books were the same as the first national textbook of Korean grammar in this sense.
But the intrinsic attribute related with negative sentence is not ‘ambiguity’ but ‘vagueness’. One sentence has more than two explicitly different meanings. We call this attribute of the sentence ‘ambiguity’. But if one sentence has comprehensive and vague meaning, we call this attribute ‘vagueness’. The negative sentence has very comprehensive meaning excluding only the meaning of the positive sentence. This is basically related with ‘vagueness’ and almost every plural interpretations of negative sentences are derived from it.
In the comprehensive meaning of negative sentence, if there are more than two explicit meanings, we may call this ‘ambiguity’. We think that one negative sentence in Korean can be interpreted as partial and total negations and we can confirm that this sentence is ambiguous by ‘the test of ambiguity’. So, it may be dangerous to say that the intrinsic attribute of negative sentence is not ‘ambiguity’ but ‘vagueness’. But this like phenomenon is the same as how homonyms make ‘ambiguity’. Therefore we can still say that the intrinsic attribute of negative sentence is ‘vagueness’.
From now on, school grammar textbooks and Korean academic grammar books should make it clear that the plural interpretations of one negative sentence are derived from ‘vagueness’.