Lonely Negative Words in English and Korean

Oh, Miran. 2015. Lonely Negative Words in English and Korean. English Language and Linguistics 21.2, 83-100. Cross-linguistically, some words are used only in a negative sense. In this paper, these Lonely Negative Words (LNWs) in English and Korean are investigated through descriptions of their origins and real usages. As for English, the LNWs with negative affixes do not have positive counterparts (e.g., disgust, disappoint, incessant, etc.). In this case, either the positive forms never existed or vanished gradually. On the other hand, the meanings of Korean LNWs are interpreted as negative regardless of the presence of the negative elements (e.g., cayswu-eps-ta/cayswu, cwuchayk-eps-ta, etc.). This difference between the use of English and Korean LNW may be due to the syntactic difference of each language’s negative elements. The negative affix in English LNWs together with the stem composes one single word, whereas the negative predicate itself in Korean LNWs composes an independent constituent. Therefore, extracting the positive form without negation is more difficult in English. The current paper aims to introduce and compare the LNWs in English and Korean. This research points out an interesting fact that in some existing words, only the negative meanings survive.