{"pk":48966,"title":"A New Look at Morphosyntactic Phenomena in Korean: No Case Markers but Verbal Postpositions","subtitle":null,"abstract":"

This paper investigates the morphosyntactic status of Korean 'particles', which should be reanalyzed as affixes, clitics, or words. Despite their central role in Korean grammar, few studies have acknowledged the existence of clitics in the language. Building on the foundational analysis in Chae (2020), this study revises and extends previous claims in two key directions. First, following Chae (2023a), we argue that the particles -i/ka and -ul/lul, conventionally treated as nominative and accusative case markers, are more accurately analyzed as delimiters with identical meanings. This reanalysis has broad implications for constructions traditionally explained in terms of case marking. Second, we propose a new lexical category of 'verbal postpositions' (vPs) to account for sentence endings, thereby eliminating the need to posit a complementizer phrase (CP) at the sentence level. We argue that the CP analysis is both conceptually and empirically problematic, as CPs are typically selected by elements within a clause. 

","language":null,"license":{"name":"Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0","short_name":"CC BY-NC-ND 4.0","text":"Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\n\nNonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.\n\nNoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.\n\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0"},"keywords":[],"section":"Invited Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9xb1f84s","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Hee-Rahk","middle_name":"","last_name":"Chae","name_suffix":"","institution":"Hankuk University of Foreign Studies","department":"Linguistics and Cognitive Science"}],"date_submitted":"2025-07-11T13:22:21.369000Z","date_accepted":"2025-07-11T20:54:42.263000Z","date_published":"2025-07-07T10:00:00Z","render_galley":{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/japanesekoreanlinguistics/article/48966/galley/36886/download/"},"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/japanesekoreanlinguistics/article/48966/galley/36886/download/"}]}