Suh, Sungki. 2017. State Readings and Boundedness in the Korean Progressive. Studies in Generative Grammar, 27-3, 649-674. The Korean progressive -ko iss form often produces a state reading rather than a progressive reading when it occurs with a state verb, whereas the English progressive is basically incompatible with state verbs and produces a state reading only in very limited cases. We claim that, in spite of such a contrast, progressives in the two languages share a crucial property: The presence of Hold and the absence of Cul (culmination) in the sense of Parsons (1989) govern the basic distribution of progressives in Korean as well as in English. Meanwhile, the more generous distribution of Korean progressive can be attributed to its unique licensing condition, i.e., the boundedness condition, which only excludes the verbs describing an unbounded state from taking the progressive form. As for the exceptional cases of English progressive, the mechanism of type coercion can explain how a state verb occurs in its progressive form.
1. Introduction
2. Aspectual classification of verbs
3. Properties of the progressive
4. Korean progressive sentences with a state reading
5. Type coercion in English state verbs
6. Conclusion
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