Abstract
One peculiarity of Korean morphosyntax is the existence of a large set of converbal suffixes. A survey of previous descriptions reveals a lack of consensus in the analysis of these converbs. Too often they have been pressed into a Eurocentric dichotomy of subordination versus coordination, leading to confusion about their typological status. Trying to correct this approach by describing the language on its own terms is therefore the main objective of our paper. We compare the morphosyntactic behavior of four selected suffixes with respect to some relevant criteria for subordination versus coordination, such as the scope of illocutionary operators, shared TAM, subject coreference, constituent order, and the development of dependent verb forms into complex predicates or adpositions. This empirical research feeds back into the theoretical discussion, as it will be shown that the Korean converbs can indeed be described using conventional typological concepts if construed appropriately. Our second objective is therefore to review the criteria involved in describing clause-linkage and to see how relevant terminology can be used more consistently. The conclusion is that the four converb types turn out to be located on a continuum between coordination and subordination, thus constituting an instantiation of syntax-semantics isomorphism.
Abbreviations
- acc
accusative
- at
attributor
- d
deictic (demonstrative)
- dat
dative
- decl
declarative
- hon
honorific
- illoc
illocutionary force
- imp
imperative
- ind
indicative
- inf
infinitive
- inst
instrumental
- int
interrogative
- irr
irrealis
- loc
locative
- nom
nominative
- nr
nominalizer
- pol
polite
- pot
potential
- prs
present
- pst
past
- retr
retrospective
- top
topic
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- The probability of external causation: An empirical account of crosslinguistic variation in lexical causatives
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- Utterance-final particle -canha in modern spoken Korean: A marker of shared knowledge, (im)politeness, theticity and mirativity
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- Korean converbs between coordination and subordination
- Asymmetries of null subjects and null objects in L1-English and L1-Japanese learners’ Chinese
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The probability of external causation: An empirical account of crosslinguistic variation in lexical causatives
- Why use or?
- Utterance-final particle -canha in modern spoken Korean: A marker of shared knowledge, (im)politeness, theticity and mirativity
- Strong pronouns in modern spoken French: Cliticization, constructionalization, grammaticalization?
- Korean converbs between coordination and subordination
- Asymmetries of null subjects and null objects in L1-English and L1-Japanese learners’ Chinese
- Synaesthesia in Chinese: A corpus-based study on gustatory adjectives in Mandarin
- Publications received between 2 June 2017 and 1 June 2018