Aspectual and focus adverbs in English and Korean
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Abstract
This article presents a comparative semantic analysis of the aspectual and focus adverbs already, still and STILL in English and imi/pelsse 'already' and acik/ yothay 'still' in Korean based on their presuppositions and their focus interpretation. I argue that the two contrasting views of aspectual adverbs as logical duals and as scalar (focus) particles are both necessary in order to explain the English and Korean data. Aspect concerns the internal structure of events, relating a current state with the onset or the end of the state. These transitions are available for focusing, which triggers an explicit contrast between the asserted state and an alternative state with an opposite polarity. Korean is shown to lexicalize aspectual and focus adverbs differently from what is expressed in English by a single adverb with focus marked prosody. The meaning of aspectual and focus adverbs in both English and Korean is representated in Discourse Representation Theory van Eijck and Kamp 1997).
Key takeaways
- While still is an aspectual adverb indicating that the actual situation has been the case before, the stressed STILL triggers a focus configuration in which the described situation is contrasted with an alternative situation of John's not being asleep in (11b).
- (22) a. Aspectual adverb imi Assertion: p @ t Presupposition: START [p]<t b.
- As observed in (25a) and (26a), the assertion of acik is the same as that of imi, both expressing that the relevant state holds now, but they differ in that imi utilizes the aspectual verb start, while acik employes not finish or continue in the presupposition.
- The presupposition that he fell asleep earlier is added by representing the meaning of the aspectual adverb imi.
- Still and acik presuppose p before t and assert p at t. Focus adverbs (STILL, yothay, already and pelsse) assert p at t and contrast p with ∼p at t. The semantic notions of assertion, presupposition, alternatives, and negation, together with starting and finishing, clearly capture the logical relations between aspectual and focus adverbs in both English and Korean in Discourse Representation Theory.
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