A Study on the Corresponding Types of Expectation Markers ‘Guoran’ and ‘과연’ in Chinese and Korean

In the expression of the expectation category, Chinese ‘Guoran’ is a typical expression of expectation, which mostly indicates that the facts are consistent with the expectations, it also carries the speaker’s emotional attitude. Corresponding with Chinese, Korean also has the expression ‘과연(果然)’. From a lexical point of view, it is easy to think that the two correspond, but does the Chinese ‘Guoran’ and the Korean ‘과연’ really correspond exactly? Based on the semantics and example sentences of dictionaries, this paper examines the corresponding phenomenon of ‘Guoran’ in Chinese and Korean from the perspective of two-way language comparison. Preliminary conclusions can be drawn as follows: (1) The Chinese expectation marker ‘Guoran’ corresponds to Korean adverbs, conjunction endings, phrases, idiomatic forms, compound forms and other expression types, and the Korean expectation marker ‘과연’ corresponds to the six types of adverb expressions in Chinese, such as expectation type, exploration type, truth type, confirmation type, exclamation type and so on. There is a cross-correspondence phenomenon between Chinese and Korean, but the two-way correspondence between Chinese and Korean is the most. (2) The expectation marker of ‘Guoran’ and ‘과연’ has similarities and differences in the horizontal and vertical directions. In the horizontal direction, the expression of ‘Guoran’ in Chinese is more balanced, homogeneous, cohesive, and concentrated, the expression of ‘과연’ in Korean is relatively unbalanced, heterogeneous, and discrete. In the vertical direction, the corresponding forms of Chinese ‘Guoran’ are diverse and the semantics are concentrated. The corresponding form of Korean ‘과연’ is relatively simple but the semantics are relatively plentiful and complementary to each other, which reflects the economy of language to a certain extent.