Semantic Role of Korean Numeral Auxiliaries : Specification of referential Meaning

This paper presents the semantic role of numeral auxiliaries in Korean language. Used with a numeral determiner and a common noun, Korean numeral auxiliaries form a nominal group to express the quantity of a referent. They are often called numeral classifiers, especially in cognitive linguistics, since their compatibility with common nouns shows certain patterns that seem to result in a hierarchical structure of the common nouns. In our analysis of fifty numeral auxiliaries in three large corpora, however, we found that this type of classification does not fully reflect the linguistic reality. Our analysis shows that the main semantic function of Korean numeral auxiliaries is to specify the referential properties of the common noun that is very often referentially under-specified in Korean. We also argue that mass/count noun distinction is not sufficient in characterizing Korean common nouns, and that additional factors such as eventuality, compositionality and measuring type should be taken into account