시제구분에 대한 논쟁과 제안

A Proposal on Tense Classification: Centering on English and Korean

Linguistic means of conveying time should be considered based on philosophical and psychological factors such as the relation of the concept of time to the “reality of time”. Although time exists independently of language, it is an integral part of tense since it conveys information about time. This paper has two aims; one is to show the various concepts of tense revealing how they are reflected in English and Korean through the investigation of previous researches. The other is to clarify the notion of tense based on the ontological concept of time arguing that PAST is the only compatible tense. The reason that other grammatical tenses are considered as aspects or mixtures of tense and aspect is that they are still in the process of evolution: from aspects of action to specific tenses. The confusion between tense and aspect is due to the fact that tense developed or evolved from aspect in many languages; evolutionally, tense and aspect do not present themselves as separate categories and are interwoven in grammatical systems in that one and the same grammatical form may combine temporal and aspectual elements.