Grammatical Function of 在 as Preposition and Aspect Auxiliary

Grammatical Function of 在 as Preposition and Aspect Auxiliary - 서월아 Many scholars have debated on the categorization of 在 in Chinese language, because it can be analyzed as a verb, a preposition, or a serial verb. They classify the word 在 as a verb in the structure like [在+ Noun] in sentence final, and a preposition in [在 + Noun + VP] structure, and a serial verb in [在+ VP] structure. That is, they tried to describe the meaning of the word based on the different kind of the category. However, they disregard the grammatical functions of the word. In this respect, we could treat the word as a functional relation such as functor-argument in the model of categorial grammar. The grammatical function of 在 in [在 + Noun] could be analyzed as a argument of the subject, and 在 in [在 + Noun + VP] could be analyzed as functor of [Noun + VP] regardless of the categories. And 在 in [在 + VP] could be analysed as an aspectual modal which is a functor expression taking the sentence as the argument. Those grammatical aspects of Korean and English can be found in the copula verb structure such as John is tall, John is at home. in English, or 산이 높다(Mountains are high), 철수는 집에 있다(Chulsu is at home) in Korean. On the same way we could find that aspectual auxiliary usage of 在 is same as the John is reading a book in English and 철수가 책을 읽고 있다(Chulsu is reading a book) in Korean respectively. However, we would like to point out that the Chinese [在 + VP] structure is quite different from the serial verb constructions in English and Korean. There are some problems to figure out that Chinese copula 是 works as be in English or 이다(be) in Korean, and what is the grammatical function of copula in those languages.