9 The Adjective Class in Korean 239issta 'exist', epsta 'not exist, absent', and kyeysita 'stay' (honorific) maybe viewed as
forming a sub-set of this semantic type. In POSITION, 'right', 'left', 'northern', etc. are
expressed only by SK nouns or native nominal compounds.
As noticed, antonym pairs are ubiquitous in most semantic types, except perhaps
in colour terms. In regard to the syntagmatic order among adjectives, Korean, a
relatively free-order language, does not seem to have any preferred ordering among
different semantic types. In general, individual adjectives with a wider scope tend
to occur first.
4.2. SEMANTIC OVERLAP BETWEEN THREE MAJOR WORD CLASSES
Lexical items are usually assigned to different word classes based on their mor-
phosyntactic properties, although meanings are correlated with the grammatical
properties to a great extent. For example, Dixon (Ch. i) indicates that the concept
of'beauty' is a noun in some languages (including English) but a verb in others (to-
toka in Fijian). It is an adjective in native Korean (yeypputa, alumtapta) and a noun
in Sino-Korean (mi).
The semantic contents of the adjective classes in Korean and English are very
similar in that most adjectives in Korean correspond to adjectives in English, and
vice versa. There are, however, some small semantic fields for which Korean has
native adjectives while English has verbs, and vice versa.
(29) (a) Verb in English Adjective in Korean
hate mipta
differ taluta
miss kulipta
like cohta
be ita, issta
(b) Adjective in English Verb in Korean
dry maluta
wet cecta
old (animate) nulkta
tired cichita
dead cwukta
Dixon points out that, in individual languages, a given concept may be coded (i)
by both verb and noun; (2) by both adjective and noun; and (3) by both verb and
adjective. In English, he finds many instances of (i) and (2), but few of (3), one ex-
ample being fear and afraid. He also finds exactly the opposite situation in Dyir-
bal, in which no overlap is found between verb and noun classes, or between adjec-
tive and noun classes, but considerable semantic overlap exists between the classes
of verb and adjective. How about Korean? Observe the following pairs, where (a)
illustrates non-cognate pairs, (b) cognate pairs, and (c) pairs of no formal differ-
ence.