Differences between two alleged perfects in Korean

This paper provides a systematic semantic account of the auxiliary verb paid a/e noh and a/e twu in Korean, which have been commonly assumed in the literature to express the perfect as synonyms, indicating the event described by their main clause complements has ended. Contrary to this common assumption, this paper argues that a noh is a dynamic event description, focusing on culmination, whereas a twu is static, triggering a presupposition about the causal event. This opposition corresponds to a difference between asserting the completion of an event and asserting a current state of resulting from a past event that is presupposed to have already taken place. This papers provides empirical evidence supporting this claim: The two markers are distinguished when embedded in change of state predicates in sentences. In discourse, a noh describes a following/preceding episode, whereas a twu expresses an overlapping state. The semantic differences between the two have been represented formally using the logical tools of Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp and Reyle (1993)). In DRT, a noh moves the reference time (Rpt) forward, while a twu represents a state preserving the given Rpt.