Song, Sanghoun. 2015. A Parallel Corpus-based Analysis of the Past Tense Morpheme in Korean. Language Information. Volume 20. 75-104. In human language, a single linguistic form can be used to convey different meanings. One of the most representative forms which involve such a relation between form and meaning in Korean is the verbal inflectional morpheme (e/a)ss. This morpheme is responsible for the past tense by default, but in more than a few cases it does not necessarily denote an event that happened in the past. This article probes into the past tense morpheme in Korean (e/a)ss in a way of comparative corpus linguistics. In order to create the findings using a data-based method, the present study explores a bilingual parallel corpus in which a sentence in one language is aligned to the corresponding sentence in the other language. The parallel data the current work makes use of is the Sejong English-Korean Bilingual Corpus. Exploring the parallel data, this corpus study provides a quantitative analysis of (i) which linguistic form in English the past tense morpheme in Korean corresponds to and (ii) which verbs are more frequently associated with the non-past meanings when they are combined with (e/a)ss.
Key words: the past tense morpheme, (e/a)ss, tense, aspect, the Sejong English-Korean Bilingual Corpus, comparative corpus linguistics