KOREAN LANGUAGE TUTORIAL

LESSON 6

Korean lessons: Lesson 6

Base forms and Stems
In a language, we find three basic ways of describing facts: description of action, state, and identity.

To describe an action, we use verbs.
For example, in English, we say "I eat lunch," which describes the action ('eating') of the subject ('I').

To describe a state, we use adjectives. When we say, "I am tall," it describes the state ('being tall') of the subject ('I'). Describing an identity is relating one thing to another, characterizing the property of the subject. To say "I am a student" is characterizing a property of the subject ('I'), by identifying the subect as a student. When we talk about facts that happened in the past, or a something that will happen in the future, the story is not simple. In English, if the your action of eating had happened in the past, you need to use a different form of the verb, i.e., "I ate lunch." If you used to be quite tall for your age in the past, but it is not the case now, you have to say, "I was tall."

For similar reasons, we say, "I was a student." In order to differentiate the mode of facts, such as tense, we make variation on the predicates--in other words, verbs, adjectives, and noun phrases, etc.

This variation is called "conjugation." Like English, Korean also uses this conjugation of predicates. Therefore, in a verb predicate,

for example, we see a part that is constant in all kinds of sentences, and the other part that changes according to the modes of facts. (Think of "push, pushes, pushed, pushing..." in English. "Push" is the constant, where "-es", "-ed", and "-ing" are alternating.)

The constant part is called the 'stems'. The conjugation in Korean is made by attaching different suffixes to the stems.

가 요
stem mid-polite suffix
"to go/leave" (present tense)

"가", a lexical verb stem, is attached with a mid-polite suffix "요", making a present-tense predicate. ("-요" has more stories.

We will learn them later.) Subjects can be omitted in many simple everyday-conversational sentences, as long as they are obvious by the context. "가요"thus can be used in the sense of "I go," "you go," or sometimes, "He goes," etc. With an intonation rising at the end ( ), it can be a question, "Do you go (Are you leaving?)" or "Shall we go?", etc. It can even be taken as an imperative sentence, "Go (Leave)!"

A stem is a part of a verb predicate, not a whole word. When we list it in dictionaries, or refer to it as a word--just as when we say "to go" or "to eat" as words--, we add "다" at the end of a stem. Thus,

Stem + 다 = Base Form

가 + 다 = 가다 (Base Form, "to go")