Pluperfects in Korean and English discourse

This paper provides an explanation of the distributional differences in the use of pluperfect in Korean and English in terms of the interplay between discourse properties and crosslinguistic variations in the interpretation of the pluperfect forms. I argue that the English pluperfect is ambiguous between preterit and aspectual meanings, while the Korean pluperfect has only a preterit meaning, requiring the absence of result state at the reference time. In narratives, where the reference time is in the past and the speech time is irrelevant, the pluperfect in both languages induces a flashback effect. In non-narratives, where the reference time coincides with the speech time, the English pluperfect does not show up because its two functions, i.e., signaling an event preceding the reference time and describing a state holding at that time, are served by the simple past and the present perfect, respectively. By contrast, the Korean pluperfect naturally occurs in non-narratives, encoding the discontinuity of the result state at the speech time. This paper discusses further semantic-discourse constraints on the pluperfect and argues that pluperfect, in both preterit and aspectual interpretations, must be related to the context event in terms of topicality. This paper shows that knowledge about the discourse structure influences the semantic interpretation of tense and aspect and proposes a common discourse role of the category pluperfect in both Korean and English.