The Korean verbal suffix -ess-: a diachronic account of its multiple uses

This paper examines the multiple uses of the verbal suffix -ess- in Modern Korean discourse. -ess- appears to be used with several different meanings which cannot be captured in a single grammatical category, including ‘perfect of result’, ‘experiential’, ‘anterior continuing’, ‘perfective’, and ‘simple past’. Based upon the results of analyzing spontaneous conversational data, the present study shows that temporal/aspectual meaning of the utterances that contain -ess- relies heavily on various contextual factors, confirming the findings by Lee [Lee, Hyo Sang, 1991. Tense, aspect, and modality: a discourse-pragmatic analysis of verbal suffixes in Korean from a typological perspective (unpublished doctoral dissertation, UCLA) Lee, Hyo Sang, 1993a. Tense or aspect: the speakerʹs communicative goals and concerns as determinant with respect to the anterior -ôss- in Korean. Journal of Pragmatics 20, 327-358. The study suggests that the multiple uses of ess- and the noted context-dependency of its interpretation in Modern Korean may be best accounted for by taking a diachronic perspective; in other words, this may be the result of the grammaticization of the suffix, which has rendered its basic meaning at the current stage very general. Specifically, -ess- is hypothesized to be located at a later stage of its historical development from the resultative construction to the perfective/past, thus warranting the label "old anterior" (Bybee, Joan L., Perkins, Revere, Pagliuca, William. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.).