Ambiguity of Response Particles to Negative Utterances in Korean and English

Abstract

This study explores the ambiguity of Korean response particles (RP) ung 'yes' and ani 'no' responding to long form negation (LFN), in comparison to the ambiguity of RPs to the so-called "high negation" and "low negation" in English. The results show that i) the ambiguity of Korean LFN is due to two possible interpretations, i.e., pragmatic and literal, ii) Korean RPs are anaphors, supporting Krifka's (2013) propositional anaphoric approach to English RPs, but iii) they refer to only one antecedent from the preceding proposition, that is, for the outermost NegP only, for both SFN (short form negation) and LFN. In contrast, the ambiguity of English high negation is twofold. One type of ambiguity is due to the two possible interpretations of high negation, pragmatic versus literal, just like Korean; the other type of ambiguity occurs within the literal meaning of high negation and is due to the availability of multiple antecedents, just like with English low negation.

PARAMETRIC DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ENGLISH AND KOREAN RESPONSE PARTICLES: A DISCOURSE‐BASED HPSG APPROACH1

“…5 The predicate type of a given sentence or the context where it is used, however, could lead to different uses of SFN and LFN. For a further discussion, see Wee (2019) and references therein.…”