COMPARATIVE STUDY ON KOREAN AND INDONESIAN NOUN PHRASE INCLUDING NUMERAL CLASSIFIER

Abstract

Speakers from different language might attend reality in different way. Lucy (1992) experimented on English and Yucatec speakers. One of the experiment questions is how they classify a cardboard. Different answers from different speakers were obtained. While the classification of English speakers for cupboard is material based, Yucatec speakers opted for shape-based classification. It indicates that speakers from different language might classify referent to different class of nouns. This can be seen clearly in Yucatec for the categorization device (something like ‘piece’) of noun referent is shown on surface level. Some languages have particular linguistic devices to classify the entities represented by nouns according to the nature, the number, the shape, the location or other inherent semantic features these entities. The range of noun categorization frameworks and the degree of semantic notion vary from one language to another. We refer to this device as classifier. In linguistics, there are several goals of classifier studies. It ranges from universal and typological study of classifier to language-specific ones. Another type of research is carried out in more computational perspective. However, in this paper we aim at comparing the characteristics of the numeral classifier between Korean and Indonesian languages. We here discuss the similarity and the difference of the main features of noun phrases including classifiers in both languages. This paper is organized in the following order. First chapter described background, type of research and subject languages of our research. In chapter two, we highlight types of classifier, and found out that Korean and Indonesian classifier fall to the same category. The category might be the same, but there are differences on the lexical properties and syntactic pattern of classifier constructions. We discuss properties of lexical units that compose classifier construction: numeral, classifier itself, and noun in chapter three. Chapter 4 focuses on the pattern of classifier construction. Summary and perspective for further research is available on conclusion, the last chapter of our research.