Two nows in Korean

Abstract

This paper presents a study of the two lexical adverbs in Korean, cikum and icey, which are assumed to be synonymous with each other and equivalent in meaning with English now. Because cikum and icey seem to be interchangeable in many instances without significant differences, their distinctive semantic features have been overlooked and not systematically studied. Starting from an overview of previous studies of cikum and icey, which focus on the intra-sentential analysis, this paper claims that, contrary to common assumptions, cikum and icey differ inherently in terms of the viewpoint of perspective taking in narrative discourse. Using examples drawn from a corpus, we argue that cikum simply refers to a time interval that contains the reference point from which the described event is viewed. On the other hand, icey describes a change in situation, showing that the reference point can be perceived as a point that divides the past and the future seen from this vantage point. Subsequently, we show that English now has in fact two functions corresponding to the Korean cikum and icey. The semantic differences between cikum and icey in narrative discourses are represented in discourse representation theory. Cikum preserves the given reference time, elaborating on an event described by the preceding sentence, while icey introduces a new reference time, updating the temporal context with a shifted temporal perspective.