Clitic and Affix Combinations: Korean Nominal Template Redux

Abstract

I claim à la Choi (2023) that semantic case morphemes in Korean are clitics, which are syntactically indepen- dent words of postpositions quite unlike structural case morphemes which are affixes. It follows that nominal expressions with a semantic case morpheme are PPs whereas those with a structural case morpheme are NPs. The present proposal thus crucially diverges from Cho and Sells (1995), who claims that case morphemes in Korean, be they structural or semantic, are affixes. I will discuss the important implications of the present proposal hitherto unnoticed in the literature for the post-nominal morphemes in the so called nominal template by Cho and Sells (1995). which is morphological in nature. These findings strongly suggest that templatic approach by Cho and Sells (1995) is simply wrong.