Young-eun Yoon

Yoon, YoungEun. 2012. The English present perfect and simple past tense. Linguistic Research 29(3), 485-513. As is well known, the English present perfect incorporates temporal anteriority as part of its meaning. However, such conflicting phenomena like the ‘definiteness effect’ and the ‘lifetime effect’ are observed, along with the pastness of the perfect. In this context, a variety of theories utilizing concepts such as ‘indefinite past,’ ‘perfect state,’ and ‘extended now’ have been proposed

It is generally observed that transitive constructions with inanimate subjects are not usually preferred either in English or Korean. However, Korean exhibits a much stronger nonpreference for those constructions than English. To account for this difference between English and Korean, Kim et al.(2009) resort to ‘animacy,’ whereas Jang(2009) employs ‘agentivity.’ However, since these concepts, ‘animacy’ and ‘agentivity,’ serve as primary factors in determining the subject of a transitive construc

Yoon, YoungEun. 2011. The English Resultative and Experiential Perfects: A Reply to Mittwoch (2008). Korean Journal of Linguistics, 36-1, 133-155. Mittwoch (2008) analyzes the meanings and distributional restrictions of the English Resultative and Experiential perfects. She proposes that the Resultative perfect derives the so-called and inferences, and that the former is part of the truth conditional meaning of the sentence while the latter is a special type of conventional implicature. She also

Irony and humor have long been studied as two closely related phenomena by numerous researchers. Some, including Hanninen (1989) and Dews et al. (1995), have argued that humor derives from irony, while others, including Hay (2001), have regarded irony as a variety of humor. Recently, Hirsch (2008; 2011a, b) proposes a comparative model that differentiates irony from humor in the literary texts by means of some cues for irony and humor. Reyes et al. (2012) also propose a set of features that repr

It is well accepted that the meaning of English simple past is represented by the suffix ess in Korean. This suffix is also proposed to represent the meaning of English present perfect. By some others, however, the perfect meaning is argued to come from sources other than ess. In this context, the main purpose of this paper is to reinvestigate the meaning of ess and to reconsider the sources of the perfect meaning of Korean. It will be reconfirmed that the perfect meaning is not derived from the

Quite recently, two interesting approaches to generics have been put forth, both of which attempt to account for generics based on the notions of alternative sets of entities and features, and relative generics. They are both argued to have much in common with Leslie’s (2008, 2013) cognition-based approach, but grounded on Cohen’s (1999) analysis of relative generics. However, they differ in that the approach by van Rooij and Schulz (2020) tries to explain various generics with the representativ

Cohen and Erteschik-Shir (2002) propose that topic/focus structure determines the generic and existential interpretations of bare plurals. They propose that topic bare plurals are interpreted generically, whereas focused bare plurals are interpreted existentially. They further propose that individual/stage-level predicate distinction plus other predicate type distinctions, argument/adjunct distinction, and presuppositional/non-presuppositional verb distinction play a role in determining the topi

Korean is known to have a well-developed honorification system, which is observed to be composed of strategic as well as normative honorification rules. Given this, how to treat the so-called hearer honorific si, which is to honor the hearer, not to honor the subject NP predicated with the verb with si, has been a quite controversial issue in recent years. National Institute of Korean Language and the media are labeling this usage, which is mostly observed in the service context, as a serious la

Yoon, YoungEun. 2012. Pragmatic Minimalism vs. Maximalism: A Reply to Hansen (2008). Korean Journal of Linguistics, 37-1, 179-198. Bach (2001, 2005) argues for a clear division between semantics and pragmatics. In the same vein, he proposes that the so-called minimal notion of ‘what is said’ is available to language users. On the other hand, Recanati (2001, 2004) argues that the minimal notion of what is said, i.e., the so-called minimal proposition, is not what the sentence says and has no posi

Language and Information 12.2 , 21-47. This paper reviews the analysis of the so-called Korean NPIs, amu-(N)-to and amu-(N)-rato, proposed by An (2007). An proposes that the two so-called polarity items are identical semantically, tantamount to English even, but they are in complementary distribution due to the opposite scope properties of the emphatic particles to and rato contained in the NPIs in question. Resorting to Karttunen and Peters' (1979) and Wilkinson's (1996) scope analysis of even,

The semantic literature on definiteness and specificity shows that the former is relatively an established notion, whereas the latter is still a vague notion that needs to be more clarified and confirmed. Given this, Ionin (2006) argues for the reality of specificity based on the informal use of this. She proposes this in spoken English as a specificity marker which has a semantic feature indicating "peaker intent to refer" and "noteworthiness." She also provides as evidence the results of some