접사의 유사-기호성 성격

Sign-like Behavior of Affixes: Synonymic relationships of Korean and Uzbek derivational affixes with the meaning ‘having’ and ‘without’

The present paper aims at proving sign-like behavior of affixes by focusing on one of the semantic properties of derivational affixes, namely, synonymy. To prove the fact that derivational affixes get into synonymic relationship with other derivational affixes within the language, I first collected synonymous derivational affixes with the meaning ‘having’ and ‘without’ from Korean and Uzbek. After organizing affixes into pairs, I applied two out of three synonymy-related tests, the opposite test and substitution test, which were originally proposed by Ullmann(1962) and reintroduced in Lim(2008) to test synonymy of lexemes. Applying these tests to derivational affixes that can be attached to an identical stem showed that (1) majority of affixes in both languages can be in synonymic relationship with other affixes, which indicates that affixes can have semantic properties just like lexemes and thus be viewed as signs and that (2) along with the universality of synonymy, derivational affixes can display individual properties when the opposite test is applied to them.