<滿文老檔> 편지글에 나타나는 직시투사 ― unggihe ‘보낸다’류 동사를 중심으로 ― = Deictic projection in letters of Manwen Laodang: Focusing on expressions of unggihe ‘(I) send’

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In the letters recorded in Tongki fuka sindaha hergen i dangse (Manwen Laodang), the verb meaning ‘(first-person sender) send (a letter/item/ person, etc. to the recipient)’ appears in several forms depending on the status relationship between the sender and the recipient, such as unggi- ‘send’, jafa- ‘offer’, wasimbu- ‘send down’, and wesimbu- ‘submit’. These verbs have in common that they are typically combined with the past tense -HA, which is contrary to the fact that in Written Manchu from the 17th to 19th centuries, the -HA suffix typically refers to a past event prior to the utterance, while the event of sending a letter should be later or at least contemporaneous with the moment of writing (=utterance). Some take this peculiar use of the past tense as evidence that tense contrast does not exist in Written Manchu. However, this study attempt to explain this peculiar use of the past tense by adopting the concept of ‘deicitic projection’, which appears similarly in Classical Latin letters, maintaining the view that Written Manchu was a tense language that grammatically expressed the past/non-past temporal opposition. To conclude, in terms of temporal deixis, the deictic origo (now) moves to the future point in time when the recipient receives the letter, and the point in time when the sender sends the letter is described as a past situation. This is also related to the peculiar use of Written Manchu sakini ‘let (third person) know’ in letters, with the recipient (=second person) as the subject.