A Study on the Combinatorial Restrictions of the Auxiliary Verb Construction ‘-e peli-’ of Two Different Modal Meanings for Korean Education

This study examined combinatorial restrictions of preceding verbs and subjects with the auxiliary verb construction ‘-e peli-’ depending on two different modal meanings: ‘feeling of regret/disappointment’ and ‘feeling of relief’. In this study, the errors of sentences with ‘-e peli-’ were categorized by two different modal meanings and the restrictions of preceding verbs were reviewed by analyzing the causes of errors. As a result, when ‘-e peli-’ is used as the modal meaning of ‘feeling of relief’, there were more complicated restrictions of preceding verbs than when ‘-e peli-’ was used as the modal meaning of ‘feeling of regret/disappointment’. In the case that ‘-e peli-’ is used as the modal meaning of ‘feeling of relief’ and the subject is the first person, the preceding verbs require the will of the subject and must be manageable by the subject. This restriction is noteworthy and has to be explicitly taught due to the learners making the errors with this grammatical restriction most frequently while it is not the case when ‘-e peli-’ is used as the modal meaning of ‘feeling of regret/ disappointment’. When the subject is not the first person, the preceding verbs don’t require the will of the subject and don’t have to be manageable, but there was a semantic restriction of the subject; an inanimate object or abstract noun as the subject must be the negative entity that the speaker wants to remove. The inanimate object or abstract noun can be used as the subject in the sentence with the modal meaning of ‘feeling of regret/disappointment’ as well, but it doesn’t have the semantic restriction.