수관형사 ‘한’의 통시적 고찰

Diachronic Study of Numeral Pre-noun ‘han’

The purpose of this study is to describe the diachronic change of the categorial property and the usage of numeral pre-noun ‘han’ and to examine the characteristic of its change by analyzing historical corpus. Although ‘han’ is numeral pre-noun which has meaning of ‘one’, ‘han’ has various usages or meanings-indefinite referential usage, the meaning of ‘same’, adverbial usage which mean is ‘about, some’ etc.- in modern Korean. These usages and categorial properties are identified in middle and pre-modern Korean. But in that time, an original meaning and usage of ‘han’ that is quantifying the following nouns is more stronger than in modern Korean. Gradually, ‘han’ has developed indefinite referential determiner as time passes. That is, the original usage and meaning of ‘han’has been weakened but indefinite usages grow stronger. These kind of diachronic change is generally found in many languages. In other words, the most grammaticalized marker of referring indefinite is numeral ‘one’. This fact shows that the change of ‘han’ is very natural in therms of universal and typological language change of numeral ‘one’.