In this paper, the conceptual spaces of the diachronic semantic evolution of “gen” are constructed through the diachronic literature surveys, then the cross-dialect/language semantic maps are drawn as a tool to examine the rationality of the diachronic evolution. “Gen (跟)” is an action verb with the meaning of “following (跟隨)”, in Chinese history the dominant words with the semantic field of “following” have experienced the diachronic evolution of “cong (從)”, “sui (隨)” and “gen (跟)”. The development of these three words not only follows the law of parallel grammaticalization, but also each has its own feature. From the comparison diachronic and cross-dialect /language semantic map of the “following (跟隨)” meaning, it can be seen that, non-cognate words with family characteristics may also have the same semantic evolution. Some phenomena in the synchronic regional semantic maps that violate the “semantic map connectivity hypothesis”, may not be due to the complete lack of connection between the two nodes, but due to the choice of semantics of a specific symbolic form in the diachronic development.

Jeong, Hyeongseok. 2018. “Discursive Functions of the Free Morpheme ish1)”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 26(2). 37~62. This study aims to explore the corpus data of the free morpheme ish with special reference to its discursive functions. Derived from suffix -ish, ish develops as a free morpheme denoting a sense of approximation. On its way to broadening its functions, ish not only approximates the propositional meaning, but also hedges the speaker's attitude towards the proposition. The semantics of ish indicates that the degree is slightly below the standard, but data show that this is not always the case. Contextual factors play a part in determining the degree of ish. By thoroughly analyzing data from the corpora, I focus on the functions of the ish in the discourse level, and the role of the surrounding context in differing scale of the free morpheme ish. Moreover, I introduce the punctuation marks occurring with the use of ish in written examples by focusing on the characteristics of each punctuation mark.

It is well‐known in the literature of Korean linguistics that the difficulty with the semantic treatment of –ess lies in the fact that it can be used to refer to a past eventuality or a perfect eventuality, depending on the context of use. For this reason, after pointing out that it is of no use to posit that –ess is a past tense marker, a perfect marker, or both, this paper argues that –ess itself is neither a past tense marker nor a perfect marker, which completely departs from the previous treatments of –ess . To put it differently, -ess is indeterminate between a past tense marker and a perfect marker across the sentences in which it occurs. The context of use serves to resolve its indeterminacy by presenting the most salient semantic interpretation that may arise from –ess .