주제화와 주격조사 : 조사 "-는"과 "-가"를 중심으로

Abstract

Many studies have been done for the particle -ka and -nun. However, there still is great confusion in the usage of the two particles. Such confusion has arisen because the generative transformational studies of Korean have erroneously been undel' significant influence from works of English. This paper argues that the basic Korean sentence structure is the topic- comment contra1'y to the English subject-p1'edicate, and the subject-predicate is a structure belonging to the comment. The particle -nun indicates contrastiveness and -ka indicates exclusiveness semantically. -nun indicates marked topic for the leftmost NP and marked subject at the middle of a sentence; and -ka indicates marked topic for the leftmost NP and marked subject at the middle of a sentence. Markedness of the NP is dependent upon stress and/or newness of the information also. The natural Korean sentence structure is topic+(nun)+subject+(ka) +predicate. The reverse order of -nun and -ka or the repetition of the same particle for' both the topic and subject manifests some markedness of the NP. lt further argues that topic-prominence in Korean contrasts with subject-prominence in English, and multiple topic constructìons in Korean are reflections of the vertical thought patterns into the structure of Korean language.