Korean Verb Inflection : A Tagmemic Study of the Verb ka-

Abstract

According to Samuel Martin, on the basis of internal structure, the words of Korean clearly fall into two classes-- inflected and uninflected. Each inflected word contains the immediate constituents BASE + ENDING. The base belongs to a large but limited class of constituents which do not occur except attached to one of a much smaller class of endings, which in turn do not occur except attached to some bases. On the other hand, there is no such restriction on the occurrence of un inflected words. He further divides the uninflected words into three main classes according to external environments: nouns, particles, interjections. Inflected words are grouped into two categories: transitive and intransitive, both including processive and descriptive verbs