시제·상부사의 한국어와 태국어 대조연구

A comparative study of Korean and Thai adverbs in tense and aspect

This thesis is a comparative study of adverbs referring to tense, aspect in Korean and Thai. It aims to analyze the similarities and differences between the two languages, with the emphasis on how certain words or phrases are used to indicate specific time frames of an action in each language. The main reason why Korean and Thai belong to the different language groups. As a member of Altaic language family, Korean is agglutinative, forming words by adding inflectional endings to the end of a stem to convey grammatical functions. The specific references to a time at which an action happens is therefore indicated by affixes added to verbs. In contrast to Korean, Thai belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is characterized as an isolating language that uses specific grammatical words, rather than inflection, to express syntactic relations within sentences. Instead of indicating by affixes added to verbs, specifying tenses in Thai is achieved by using such add-on words as time adverbials and auxiliary verbs. This comparative study is expected to provide a more nuance understanding of language differences and help Thai and Korean learners to be able to choose the right and appropriate way to express tenses, aspects when translating Thai into Korean and vice versa. It is also hoped that this research lead to a more effective method in understanding languages.