A contrastive analysis of the semantic extension of the verb ‘提高’ (enhance) and the semantic domains in Korean and Chinese

This study begins from the premise that although Korean and Chinese share certain linguistic similarities, they also exhibit notable differences in their actual usage. Against this backdrop, it was observed that in Korean–Chinese translations, the Chinese verb ‘提高’ (enhance) is rendered into a wide variety of Korean expressions with diverse meanings. Despite being the same Sino-character verb, in Korean it is translated differently depending on context, such as ‘제고하다’ (enhance), ‘향상하다’ (improve), ‘높다’ (be high), ‘끌어올리다’ (boost) in Korean. Previous studies on Korean–Chinese vocabulary comparison have largely centered on dictionary-based semantic analyses. Although some research has addressed semantic extension in both languages, no contrastive study has specifically examined the semantic extension of the verb ‘提高’. Therefore, this study collects corpus data on ‘提高’, which is used in both Korean and Chinese, in order to inductively classify its various extended semantic categories and conduct a comparative analysis of its semantic extensions.