Recycling spatial representations for temporal interpretations: Korean verb compounding constructions

Abstract

It is known that there is a strong crosslinguistic tendency to use spatial expressions to explain temporal concepts, as in sentences like The meeting was pushed ahead two hours and This semester flew by so quickly. This paper offers a novel analysis of a verb compounding construction in Korean, where verbs of motion o (‘come’)/ ka (‘go’) can form compounds with non-motion verbs, yielding a particular temporal interpretation. The analysis uses a modified version of the path-algebraic approach to motion as outlined in Zwarts (2005, 2017). In the analysis, the underlying spatial representations of motion-verbs are recycled to be interpreted temporally, where the only change is the domain of evaluation. Namely, paths are interpreted with respect to a domain of times rather than a domain of spaces.