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Deriving the contrastiveness of contrastive -nun in Korean

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Abstract

The Korean particle -nun combined with an accent indicates contrast (Kuno in Linguistic Inquiry 3(3):269–320, 1972; Heycock, in: Merce (eds) Proceedings of NELS, vol 24, pp 159–187, 1993; in: Miyagawa, Saito (eds) Handbook of Japanese linguistics, Oxford University Press, Cambridge, 2007; Hara, in: Dekker, Franke (eds) Fifteenth Amsterdam colloquium, Universiteit van Amsterdam, pp 101–106, 2006; Lee, in: Lee, Gordon, Büring (eds) Topic and focus: meaning and intonation from a crosslinguistic perspective. Springer, Berlin, 2003; Tomioka, in: Zimmermann, Fery (eds) Information structure, Oxford University Press, Cambridge, pp 115–138, 2009, among many others). While this is not controversial, what it means to be contrastive remains unclear. In this paper, instead of analyzing contrastive -nun as a discourse device in the sense of information structure, as has been done in previous studies, I explore how the contrastive meaning is derived compositionally. I treat contrastive -nun as a focus sensitive particle that associates with prosodic accents in two places, generating a non-at-issue meaning. The non-at-issue meaning contains a polyadic quantifier that establishes a contrastive relationship between two elements in a given set. This analysis explains how focus following contrastive -nun is associated with -nun. It also provides an explanation for the uncertainty implicature that contrastive -nun gives rise to. Finally, it clarifies the logical relationship among different focus particles in Korean.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2013S1A5A8022231). Thanks to Dorothy Ahn, Tomoko Ishizuka, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. Special thanks to Veneeta Dayal for her extremely helpful suggestions in developing this paper.

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  1. University of Ulsan, Ulsan, South Korea

    Jieun Kim

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Kim, J. Deriving the contrastiveness of contrastive -nun in Korean. Linguist and Philos 41, 457–482 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-017-9227-6

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