Case Morphemes in Korean: Their Morphosyntactic Implications

Abstract

I will show that nominal expressions with a structural case morpheme in Korean have syntactic and morphological properties distinct from those with a semantic case morpheme as adduced in constructions involving floated quantifier, case drop on the clefts, binding condition C and Weak crossover. I claim that structural case morphemes are affixes, whereas semantic case morphemes are clitics, namely, syntactically independent words that belong to the syntactic category of postposition. It follows that nominal expressions with a semantic case morpheme are PPs whereas those with a structural case morpheme are NPs. The present thesis crucially diverges from Cho and Sells (1995), according to which case morphemes are affixes in Korean across the board, there being no independently identifiable category of postposition. I will discuss potential argument against the present proposal involving so-called genitive case marking construction in Korean, which, however, turns out to support the present thesis.