Korean

Ho-min Sohn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000012248
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This work, first published in 1994, provides a framework which covers the major aspects of contemporary standard Korean and allows cross-language comparisons. It offers a wide-ranging and comprehensive grammatical description of Korean, covering syntax, morphology, phonology, ideophone/interjections and lexicon.

CHAPTER 1. SYNTAX

1.1. General properties

Korean is a typical SOV-order language. Object normally follows subject, while a verb or adjective always comes at the end of a sentence or a clause. Pre-verbal constituents can be scrambled rather freely for stylistic and other reasons, however, as long as the predicate verb or adjective retains the final position. Due to the SOV order, Korean particles are all postpositional, and modifiers such as determiners, adverbs, possessive constructions, adjectival (relative) clauses, all types of conjunctive clauses, and verbal complement clauses must precede the modified elements. Thus, Korean is a head-final language. As in other SOV languages, Korean abounds in so-called multiple nominative and multiple accusative constructions.

Korean is a typical agglutinative language. There are several hundreds of particles and affixes (especially suffixes) in Korean. With constant form and meaning, they agglutinate with each other in a fixed order and are attached to nominal or verbal stems to perform various syntactic and semantic functions. For example, such syntactic functions as case relation, subordination and coordination, relativization, verbal complementation, passivization, causativization, as well as honorification, tense and aspect, modal and mood, and sentence types are indicated by particles or suffixes. Verbal stems also agglutinate with each other to form long series of compound verbals, as shown in ki-e tul-e w-a po-ko siph-e ha-n-ta (crawl-INF enter-INF come-INF try-NOM wish-INF do-IN-DC) ‘wants to try to crawl in’.

Korean is a typical honorific language, whose pattern is the most systematic in the world. Honorific forms appear in hierarchical address-reference terms and titles, some commonly used nouns and verbs, the pronoun paradigm, a few case particles, and, par excellence, in verbal suffixes. Because of the existence of an intricate network of honorifics, sentences can hardly be uttered without the speaker’s knowledge of his social relationships with the addressee and/or referent in terms of age category, social status, kinship, and/or in-groupness and out-groupness.

Korean may be called a situation- or discourse-oriented language, in that contextually or situationally understood elements, whether they are subject, object, or any other major sentential element, are left unexpressed more frequently than not. Thus, for example, eti ka-sey-yo (where go-SH-POL) ‘Where are you going?’ lacks subject, and cal mek-ess-sup-ni-ta (well eat-PST-AH-IN-DC) ‘I had a wonderful dinner’ lacks subject and object.

The above basic properties of Korean will serve as a background for the discussion of more specific typological characteristics to be taken up in what follows.

1.1.1. Sentence types

Korean sentences can be classified into four major types which are formally distinct: declarative (statement), interrogative (question), imperative (command), and propositive (proposal). The formal distinctions are made by sets of inflectional suffixes, called sentence-enders, which occur at the end of a verbal (verb or adjective).¹ Sentence-enders are so called because, although they are attached to a verbal, they end a sentence, thereby determining its sentence type. A sentence-ender, consisting of one or more suffixes, denotes not only one of the sentence types but also one of the six speech levels (or styles) and a mood (such as indicative, requestive or retrospective). Observe in (1) how the verb stem po ‘see’ inflects according to the four major sentence types and the six speech levels: plain (PLN), intimate (INT), familiar (FML), blunt (BLN), polite (POL), and deferential (DEF).

Many of the above sentence-enders have allomorphic variants, depending essentially on whether the preceding stem is a verb or adjective, whether the stem ends in a vowel or consonant, and whether the preceding syllable contains a “clear” or “bright” vowel (a or o) or a “dark” vowel (other than clear vowels). For example, the indicative suffix (IN) in the PLN declarative has three forms: -n after a verb ending in a vowel, -nun after a verb ending in a consonant (e.g., mek-nun-ta ‘eats’), and zero after an adjective (e.g., coh-ta- ‘is good’ and huy-ta ‘is white’). The infinitive suffix (INF) in all its occurrences has two forms: -a after a “clear vowel” in the preceding syllable and -e elsewhere, which is a process called “suffixal vowel harmony”. The blunt suffix (BLN) has three forms: -o after a vowel, -so after a verb or adjective ending in a consonant (e.g., mek-so ‘eats’ and coh-so ‘is good’), and -uo (as a free variant of -so) only after a verb ending in a consonant (e.g., mek-uo ‘eats’). The addressee honorific suffix (AH) in all its occurrences has two forms: -p after a vowel and -sup after a consonant (e.g., mek-sup-ni-ta ‘eats’).

¹ Verb and adjective in Korean have so many grammatical aspects in common that they may be considered two subcategories of a single word-class. Following a dominant tradition, however, they will be treated as distinct classes in this volume. Hie term verbal will be employed to encompass both, just as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Table of Romanization Systems
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Syntax
• Chapter 2. Morphology
• Chapter 3. Phonology
• Chapter 4. Ideophones and Interjectons
• Chapter 5. Lexicon
• Bibliography
• Index