A Brief Study On The Final Endings Of Korean Sort By Sentential Type’s Counterpart In Chinese

As a typical agglutinative language, Korean shows its grammatical forms and meanings by adding affixes to the words. This feature makes the students those native language are isolating language, especially Chinese feel strange and charm. Endings are inflection changes grammatical properties of a word within its syntactic category. The endings of Korean can be categorized in connective ending and final ending by the position in the sentence. Final endings are the endings position on the end of the sentence, connecting after the predicate root words to make the sentence and to determine the type of sentence.Final endings are often used in comparison with Chinese tone words in Korean-Chinese linguistic comparatives for they terminate and complete sentences, as well as giving themgrammatical and lexical meanings. Certainly, Chinese tone words take position at the end of the sentence and can be used as a tag to differentiate sentence types. However, it is estimated that Korean final endings amount to over300, whereas their Chinese counterparts are very limited. It is thus very difficult to correspond to Korean final endings.This article has four main sections:The first section summarizes and concludes previous researches on categorization of sentences in Korean and Chinese languages. The second section briefly explains the nature and functions of Korean final endings, which are not only decisive of sentence type, but are widely used in honorific expressions as well. In contrast, Chinese tone words are mere indicators of the speaker’s feelings and emotions; they do not have any function in terms of language registers. This part provides definitions and references in preparation for the main discussion and proves that Korean final endings cannot be directly compared to Chinese tone words. In this part we will see the similarities and differences between Korean, an agglutinative language, and Chinese, a typical isolating language.The third section is the main body of this article. It represents and effort to translate Korean examples into Chinese according to Chinese rationales and writing standards of the Mandarin language, as well as an analysis and summary of final ending correspondences based on the Standard Korean Language Dictionary, the Yonsei Korean Dictionary, and sample sentences in textbooks for foreign Korean learners.The fourth section provides a macroscopic resume. With hope, this article identifies the most appropriate final endings through translations of narrative sentences, and shall facilitate learners’comprehension of linguistic phenomena that lack correspondences in their native languages and of emotions implied in final endings. This article may also serve as a reference for more precise translating programs.