Stative progressives in Korean and English

This paper inquires into the meaning of the progressive in Korean and English by focusing on its complementation restriction. Although the English progressive, due to its semantics of "process in progress", cannot normally accept stative verbs such as know, love, have, etc., the Korean progressive ko iss form naturally occurs with them. Rather than proposing a different semantics of ko iss, such as general imperfective or resultative (Kim, 1993; Ahn, 1995), this paper suggests that know-type verbs in Korean are in fact event descriptions, or more specifically, inchoative eventualities, which indicate the inception of a continuous state. In so doing, this paper not only solves the stative verb complementation problem but also provides a unified semantics of ko iss as denoting a middle phase of a situation (Lee, 1991), encompassing both its on-going process and state readings. This analysis will also explain the difference between the Korean stative progressives and their English counterparts, the latter of which have been analyzed as instances of aspectual coercion (de Swart, 1998). The conclusions of this paper have broader implications concerning aspectual properties of psychological verbs in general, as well as the distribution of aspectual transitions in a language, both in the overt aspectual operators and in the covert coercion patterns.