Syntactic Features of the Japanese “-negau” and Korean “-himanghada” Sentence

Abstract

This study examined the syntactic structure and characteristics of the sentence constructions using the Japanese term “-negau” and the corresponding Korean term “-himanghada.” The data for the study were extracted from “Syounagon” a corpus published by Japan's National Institute of Japanese Language and Linguistics, and the example sentences were modified in a way that did not affect the study. Native Japanese and native Korean speakers assisted in determining the data's sufficiency. The study's results are summarized as follows. First, it is observed that the deep structure of the Japanese “-negau” and “-himanghada” sentence constructions are bi-clause structures in nature. These considerations were presented through the semantic domain and the phenomenon of honorific expression. Second, “-negau” and “- himanghada,” sentence constructions with a bi-clause sentence structure exhibit syntactic structures known as control and raising structures, depending on the functional characteristics of the sentence. The phenomenon of meaning interpretation of idiomatic expressions examined such conclusions. Third, the Japanese “- negau” and Korean “-himanghada” sentence constructions exhibit surface-level characteristics of the mono-clause sentence structure. This was suggested through the cleft sentence phenomenon that appears in the “-negau” and “-himanghada” sentence constructions. The results of the study, as described above, can be considered a universal characteristic that can be applied to other hopeful verb phrases found in Japanese and Korean.