Semantics of Before and After in Korean

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to provide a formal account of Korean before and after clauses with special attention paid to their morphological selection. Being apart from temporal morphology, the current analysis of Korean before and after clauses can shed new light on the discussions of selectional requirements of before and after clauses. In particular, I will show that before and after in Korean exhibit the schism based on the presence of Earliest operator of the type ,t> only in after clauses. The current paper also presents various language-specific tests, including the distribution of mod-insertion rule (cf. Kitagawa and Ross 1982, An 2014 among others). It will be shown that the complement of {Earliest, After} has to be relativized to provide a correct syntactic/semantic composition in after clauses. In contrast to Korean after, Korean before does not involve such pronominal element; therefore, it does not require the relativization of the embedded clause. (Korea Naval Academy)