Tense and Aspect in Korean

by Sung-Ock S. Sohn

This account of temporal expressions in Korean provides a more consistent, unified treatment of tense and aspect than previous works on Korean.

224 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1995

Reviews

[John Armstrong]

This book is now more than 20 years old but may still be of interest to linguists and advanced language learners with high tolerance for “current theory” linguistic exposition (and Yale transliteration – there is no hangul in the book). It takes its declared scope of tense and aspect seriously and focuses on their primary markers, suffixal -ess-, -keyss- and adnominal -(u)n, -nun and -(u)l. The analysis of these markers is fairly solid, and covers their use (and non-use) in subordinate as well as main clause types.

The book pays much less attention to other markers and constructions that belong to the broader system of tense/aspect and “mood”, including sentence enders -(u)lkka and -(u)lkey, -ney, and -kwuna etc., verb-(u)l ge + copula and most verb + auxiliary verb constructions. Particularly disappointing to me was the scant treatment of what I think are the two most interesting features of the Korean tense/aspect/”mood” system, the retrospective (-te-) with its peculiarly patched together set of forms and the quotative (plain sentence ender + optional -ko), particularly in its “extended” uses (i.e. for other than straightforward indirect quotations).