The purpose of this study is to provide a functional account of translations of progressive aspect markers ‘be -ing’ and ‘-ko issta’. This study attempts to compare progressive aspect in English and Korean in terms of semantics and discourse-pragmatics. To accomplish the purpose of the study, translation corpus was analyzed. 152 sentences with ‘-ko issta’ were selected from two Korean novels and 160 sentences with ‘be -ing’ were selected from two English novels.
From a semantic viewpoint, the results of the analysis on Korean-English parallel corpus show that the Korean progressive aspect marker is translated into two types: ⅰ) English progressive aspect markers such as be V-ing, have been V-ing or present participle; and ⅱ) English non-progressive markers such as V-ed, have V-en or past participle. It also reveals that the two types of translations are determined by the two meanings of ‘-ko issta’, viz. ‘progressive’ and ‘resultative continuousness’. ‘-ko issta’ with the ‘progressive’ meaning is translated into English progressive aspect markers and one with the ‘resultative continuousness’ meaning into non-progressive markers.
‘be -ing’ is generally categorized into four different kinds of meanings such as ‘progressive’, ‘temporariness’, ‘speaker''s attitude’, and ‘future’. The results of the analysis on English-Korean parallel corpus show that the English progressive marker is translated into three types: ⅰ) ‘be -ing’ with the ‘progressive’ meaning is translated into Korean progressive aspect markers (‘-ko issta’ or ‘-nun cwungita’), Korean present with dynamic verbs or Korean imperfective particles (‘-nun’ or ‘-tun’); ⅱ) One with the ‘temporariness’ meaning is translated into Korean resultative continuousness markers (‘-ko issta’ or ‘-e issta’) or non progressive simple tense; and ⅲ) One with the ‘speaker''s attitude’ or ‘future’ meaning is translated into modal particles/endings or verbs as a futurate use.
From a discourse-pragmatics viewpoint, this study also discusses how linguistic typology (Ikegami 1991) plays an important role in deciding foreground information encoded by means of simple tense and background information encoded by means of progressive aspect. In both languages, progressive aspect markers (‘be -ing’ and ‘-ko issta’) are used when depicting scene setting. However, because of the typological difference between Korean (BECOME language type) and English (DO language type), when Korean denotes background information using progressive, English is translated into simple tense and vice versa.