DEFECTIVE PARADIGM OF VERBS IN MODERN KOREAN

Abstract

 The purposes of this research were to 1) analyze the meanings of defective verbs; and 2) analyze the characteristics and grammatical functions of defective verbs. The electronic data in Korean language used in this research was collected and gathered from Korean corpus which appears on the website of Center for Digital Humanities, Korea University and the National Institute of Korean Studies Standard Korean Dictionary. The results indicate that   1) defective verbs are defined as the verbs with irregular inflectional forms of a lexical category, which causes the missing in a number of words and a gap in the conjugation table; and   2) characteristics and grammatical functions of defective verbs can be inflected with some inflectional ending and they can act as a relational subordinate clause, adverbial subordinate clauses, predicates, and expressions. Most of these verbs cannot act as a predicate in the main sentence, for example, “뎅기열은 어린이사망의 주된 원인으로 꼽혔다. (Dengue fever is counted as the leading cause of death in children).” “주되다 (main)” can only be inflected with “-ㄴ (-n)” while “주된”, which modifies the following noun “원인 (cause)”, acts as a relational subordinate clause in order to elaborate the main verb of a sentence which can lead to a complete theme. If words and sentence forms, which contain defective verbs, are researched and recognized, it will help enhance communication in modern Korean language to be more precise, accurate, efficient and well-accepted.