A Contrastive Study on Korean ‘ida (이다)’ and Polish ‘być’

Abstract

The aim of this study is to contrastively analyse the Korean ‘ida’ and the Polish ‘być’, and then use a Catholic Bible parallel corpus to contrast ‘ida’ and ‘być’ sentences in order to examine their respective usage patterns. Being the most basic predicate element in the Korean sentence structure, ‘ida’ displays a very frequent use. Considering its ‘functional’ aspect, ‘ida’ corresponds to ‘być’ in Polish. ‘być’ is considered the only true irregular Polish verb. In contrary to ‘ida’ in Korean, it undergoes conjugation by person and number. Moreover, as it is the case with ‘ida’, ‘być’ can be combined with a noun, yet such a noun is normally used in the instrumental case. In addition, ‘być’ can also be omitted. The results of the Bible parallel corpus examination showed that in most cases ‘CN + ida’ in Korean corresponded to ‘być + CN’ in Polish. Cases of ‘CN + ida’ corresponding to ‘być + Adj’ were also common, and they can largely be categorised into two groups. The first are so called ‘CN-jeok (적, 的) + ida’ constructions, and the second are ‘CN + ida’ constructions that do not use ‘-jeok’. The former uniformly corresponded to ‘być + Adj’ in Polish, while the latter displayed a variety of corresponding patterns. In addition, we also observed cases of ‘CN + ida’ corresponding to exclamations, verb phrases, and adverbs in Polish, and also cases with no literal translation possible due to the absence of corresponding Polish vocabulary.