A Suspicious Analysis of the Suspective Morpheme and its Homonyms

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Homonymy is a common phenomenon in language and many great writers have adroitly exploited it for various literary effects. It is a source of puns and it can be a great fun for those who can juggle words to have a large number of homophonous words at their finger tips, or on their tongue tips, to be more precise. Funny sentences containing homophonous words may not be entertaining to a linguist who is trying to present a simple and consistent description of these forms. Homonymy of lexical morphemes is less of a problem, for the context and other extra-sentential features often contribute to disambiguate these elements but the homonymy of grammatical forms, such as case markers and verbal endings, without similar clues, can give a linguist fits. To further aggravate the situation, we do not have a clear-cut criterion to depend upon to unequivocally distinguish a case of homonymy from one of polysemy. I will not indulge in theoretical speculations on descriptive procedures to deal with the problem nor on the justification of principles involved in such methodological considerations in this paper. Instead, I will simply employ a heuristic approach utilizing currently available descriptive apparatus regardless of its theoretical persuasion. The aim of this paper is to clarify a confusion in descriptions of certain homophonous items in Korean, thus sharpening our insight into the structure of the language rather than making an attempt to refine the descriptive methodology.