The purpose of this study is to reestablish the notion of Korean collocations, on which classify the collocational constructions, and investigate their syntactic and semantic characteristics. The generation of sentence, till now, has mainly examined ...
The purpose of this study is to reestablish the notion of Korean collocations, on which classify the collocational constructions, and investigate their syntactic and semantic characteristics. The generation of sentence, till now, has mainly examined in syntactic dimension. However, it cannot be satisfactorily explicated by the selectional restriction in syntax because the sentence is not generated from the combinations between the syntactic categories or the meaning classes. Therefore, we need more concrete and delicate cooccurrence restrictions such as collocational restrictions.
This thesis is divided up into four chapters. The first Chapter introduces the established researches on the collocations, to indicate that they could not only include the whole category of collocations but also consider the complicated semantic relation of collocations.
The second chapter concentrates the general characteristics of collocations. To begin with, it is more reasonable that distinguish the collocations in a narrow sense from those in a wide sense. The latter indicates the bare cooccurrence between words which are semantically and syntactically correlated with each other. On the other hand, the former is the restricted one in the meaning of that a certain word requires another. The narrow definition of collocations clearly shows the distinctive property of collocations, i.e. unidirectionality which means that a collocation consists of a selecting word(selector) and selected words(selectee), and the former necessarily requires the latter. Nouns and modifiers as well as verbs can be a selector, depending on the type of collocation. In addition to this, collocations have several characteristics as following. First, the collocations have high mental prominence, therefore, a selector easily triggers the selectee out of the mental lexicon. Second, they present the s pecific meanings, for example, inchoative, passive, cause, and activation. Third, they have restraints on structure transformation by virtue of so called restructuring. Finally, they are language-specific, in that many languages have different shape of collocations and even in a language, the shape varies depending on region, social class, occupation and genre.
On the definition above, the third chapter classify the collocational constructions. First criterion is the type of the elements, which divides them into lexical collocation and morpho-syntactic collocation. The one consists of content words, whereas the other includes the functional word. The lexical collocation is subclassified into a) presuppositional collocation, an element of which sub-specifies the other in its lexical conceptual structure(LCS) and b) habitual collocation, the elements of which are conventionally used together. These collocations are again subclassified depending on the syntactic category of the selector. The presuppositional collocation has two subordinate classes: verb-leading collocation and adverb-leading collocation. And the habitual collocation has three subordinate classes: noun-leading collocation, 'modifier+modified' collocation and 'noun(-ui) noun' collocation. Also, morpho-syntactic collocation has three subordinate classes: adverb-leading collocation, bound noun-leading c ollocation and complement verb-leading collocation. In addition, on the base on the semantic type of nouns, the noun-leading collocation is divided into restricted collocation and semi-restricted collocation. While the noun of restricted collocation is nouns of events, that of semi-restricted collocation is usually substantive noun. Most of collocations belong to the restricted collocation.
The fourth chapter investigates the semantic properties of collocational constructions, focusing on the semantic relation and function of verbs in collocations. It has been overestimated that the collocations involve the paradigmatic change in meaning, even though they are basically syntagmatic constructions. The verbs of collocations show the special semantic relations such as homonymy, antonymy and hyponymy. And I can draw out the abstract meaning such as [INCHOATIVE], [PASSIVE], [CAUSE], and [ACTIVATION] as the semantic functions of verb in collocations. This tendency of semantic extension in collocations is identical with the general process of polysemy which is a mapping from concrete domain to abstract domain.