한국어 학습자를 위한 ‘-로’의 포괄적 의미 기술 방안 연구

A Study on broad grammatical description of ‘-lo’ for learners of Korean

The purpose of this paper is to complement the pre-existing descriptions of the grammatical form ‘lo’ in textbooks and grammar books for learners of Korean by describing it at a general level and provide them with the explicit knowledge. First, it is found that the focus of grammatical description of the meaning of ‘lo’ in those books tends to be placed heavily on the particular meanings at a specific level, the meanings are not described in lucid or orderly manners, and, above all, there are no general description provided. In order to explore the meaning of the form from a broader perspective, it is necessary to focus on thoughts of the Korean linguistic community, i.e. the social context of it, instead of its linguistic context, then examine why or when they use it. Based on the analysis of descriptions of its meaning in the books, I hypothesized that the salient semantic feature of the form is that it presupposes the concept of multiple possibilities. To prove this, I examined some idiomatic expressions, in which ‘lo’ cannot be replaced by any other form. The common factor is that the concept is contained or presupposed as the common background knowledge of the speakers. They share the common belief that there are several possibilities in how or why something occurs, several places to go, several kinds of an object and so on. Therefore, I decided that ‘-lo’ is used when the speaker expresses that its preceding noun is one of several possibilities, without it being stated. In the end, I provided more in-depth grammar information regarding ‘-lo’.