Korean Copula Construction Redux

Abstract

It has been quite a controversy what the nature of the Korean copula is, witnessing a growing body of research. There have been two lines of reasoning. One is that the copula is a clitic as claimed by Chung and Kim (2002). They claim that the copula, although lexically an independent word, undergoes cliticization to its complement to be bound, thus syntactically not an independent word. The other is that the copula is an affix, hence a bound morpheme, as claimed by Cho and Sells (1995). I will show none of the proposals hold. I argue that the Korean copula is syntactically an independent word. I present various arguments, morphological and syntactic in nature, to support the present proposal.