Verbal Noun in Korean Light Verb Construction Redux

Abstract

I argue that the verbal noun, which I call the correlate, in Korean light verb construction is a verb, using various tests including telicity. The present proposal goes against the common view that claims it is a noun (Grimshaw and Mester, 1988; Ahn, 1990; Lee, 1993; and Lee, 2001), or category neutral (Park, 1992; and Pak, 1999). I will also claim that the sentence with case on the correlate and the one without case on it have the same structure, diverging from incorporation approach (Grimshaw and Mester, 1988; Ahn, 1990; Lee, 1993). I also argue that case on the correlate is focus, further undermining the proposal that the correlate is a noun in terms of syntactic category.