대한언어학회 전자저널

Lee, On-Soon. (2017). The role of Korean -(n)un in comprehending negated disjunction on the direct object position. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 25(3), 51-68. A Korean sentence like John-un ice cream-ina kheyik-ul an mek-ess-ta (John did not eat ice cream or cake) is temporarily ambiguous, permitting either the conjunctive interpretation (John ate neither ice cream nor cake) or the disjunctive interpretation (John did not eat ice cream or John did not eat cake). Yet theoretically, the topic marker -(n)un on the direct object position (ice cream-ina kheyik) forces the contrastive focus reading (Han, 1996). To assess the semantic effect of the Korean topic marker -(n)un in resolving this temporary ambiguity, a self-paced reading experiment with a Truth-Value Judgment Task was conducted with thirty native Korean-speaking adults. The participants chose the conjunctive interpretation more often in the topic-marked condition than in the accusative-marked condition. Moreover, their judgment times were shorter in the topic-marked condition. These results suggest that the semantic information carried by the topic marker -(n)un (i.e., contrastive focus) helps to resolve the temporary ambiguity of such sentences by reducing the processing load they impose.

# topic marker # contrastive focus # disjunction # ambiguity # sentence processing

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