Korean-Japanese adverbial correspondences: Korean ‘-ge’ and Japanese ‘-ku/-ni’ in Human Acts and its translation Shōnen ga Kuru

This study empirically investigates how the Korean adverbial suffix ‘-ge’ corresponds to the Japanese adverbial forms ‘-ku/-ni’ in translation. A parallel corpus was built from Han Kang's novel Human Acts (Korean original title: The Boy Is Coming) and Ide's Japanese translation, enabling quantitative and qualitative analyses. Results show an asymmetric correspondence: Korean ‘-ge’ maps onto Japanese ‘-ku/-ni’ in only 51.5% of cases (often realized as simple adverbs, nominal expressions, or ‘-te/-de’ forms), while Japanese ‘-ku’ maps onto Korean ‘-ge’ in 54.8% of cases (frequently rendered as ‘-i’ or other lexical adverbs). This asymmetry stems from the wider semantic range of ‘-ge’-including manner, result, and cause-compared with the stricter modality-result distinction in Japanese. The study clarifies structural asymmetry and diverse transformation patterns in the adverbial systems of the two languages.