A comparison of the progressive tense in Korean and English

Sung, Tae Soo

Article

Journal of English Teaching through Movies and Media 2002;3(1):77-94.
Published online June 30, 2002.

A comparison of the progressive tense in Korean and English

Tae Soo Sung

한국어와 영어의 진행형 비교

성태수

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to characterize the similarities and differences between the Korean and the English progressive tenses. For most transitive verbs and some intransitive verbs, the Korean expression "-ko iss" is used to represent not only the progressive aspect, but also the resultative aspect. However, the remainder of the intransitive verbs cannot take the morpheme "-ko iss" but take the morpheme "-a iss", instead. By comparison, the English morpheme "-ing" can be attached to almost all English transitive and intransitive verbs so as to express the progressive aspect. We accept Suzuki's (1996) term "dynamic state" to explain this difference between the Korean "-ko iss" and the English "-ing. Except for some verbs such as "iss-da", "i-da" and others, that involve static meaning, all Korean verbs can take "-ko iss." This means that whether a verb is a dynamic state verb or not, it can take "-ko iss". English verbs however, have a dynamic state meaning in order to combine with the morpheme "-ing."; the English "-ing" is more closely related to the concept of "dynamic state" than is the Korean morpheme "-ko iss."