The purpose of this research is to analyze the difference between meaning and function of the two psychological verbs ‘想(xiang)’ and ‘要(yao)’ meaning ‘hope.’ ‘想’ and ‘要’ are the two widely used words meaning ‘hope’ and are the most commonly used vocabularies. These two words can be interchanged when used to mean ‘hope’ but sometimes it is impossible to replace one another. Therefore, if both ‘想’ and ‘要’ have the meaning of ‘hope’ as their meaning and the purpose vary. This research tries to examine the meaning and use of ‘想’ and ‘要.’ The method of analyzing the difference between meaning and the role of the two psychological verbs meaning ‘hope’, ‘想’ and ‘要’ is done in the following ways; Firstly, this research looks into the definition of the words ‘想’ and ‘要’ and analyzes the semantic feature of them. Through this examination it was identified that ‘想’ has meaning of ‘hope’ but ‘要’ has features of ‘hope’ as well as ‘willingness’ and ‘duty/responsibility.’ Secondly, based on the fact that common semantic feature of ‘想’ and ‘要’ is ‘hope’ but ‘要’ has ‘willingness’ and ‘duty/responsibility’ along with ‘hope.’ As a result, this study analyzes their functional difference in terms of restriction of the subject, subject person, and object.

Korean psych verb constructions are divided into two different types: agentive psych verb constructions and stative psych verb constructions. A considerable amount of literature has been devoted to explaining the different case-marking patterns of the two constructions. Building on the HPSG feature regime, I propose two types of semantic relations, i.e. the act-relation for agentive psych verbs and the psych-relation for stative psych verbs. Such different semantic relations explain the different cases that the verbs’ objects are marked with. In addition, I show that the proposed analysis well explains scope interpretation, polysemy relations, and verb alternation of the two constructions.