Reference Point and Case

This monograph answers the rarely discussed questions of why complicated grammatical case phenomena exist in Korean and what the connection is between the case forms and their functions. The author argues that the case forms in Korean reflect patterns of the human cognitive process. While this approach may seem rather obvious to non-linguists, it is indeed a novel claim in contemporary linguistic theory. In order to provide technical analyses of Korean case phenomena such as multiple nominative/accusative, non-nominative subject, and adverbial case constructions, this book adopts an independently established descriptive construct known as reference point in the framework of Cognitive Grammar. The author demonstrates that the notion of reference point not only explains a substantially wider set of data, but also leads to a more reasonable generalization. The intended readership of this book are researchers who are interested in case phenomena, irrespective of their theoretical orientation.

James Hye Suk Yoon, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:
Formalist-distributionalist and cognitive-functionalist approaches to language offer complementary insights into the underlying logic of languages. Naturally, their subject matters do not usually overlap. In this comprehensive and ambitious monograph, Chongwon Park tackles the complicated distribution of case and grammatical functions in Korean, which has thus far been the playground of formalist approaches, and demonstrates how a cognitive-functional perspective on the most challenging case phenomena in the language reveals an underlying unity that a formalist inquiry can easily miss. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in learning about the wonderful intricacies of case and grammatical relations in Korean and their implications for our understanding of the human language capacity.