Morphological Expression and Ordering in Korean and Japanese

Abstract

This paper is concerned with three areas of Korean and Japanese morpho-syntax in which an account based on Optimality Theory seems to provide certain advantages of explanation and simplicity over previous accounts. The areas discussed are : the interaction of the copula and genitive marker with structural case markers and other 'final' nominal suffixes, such as the topic marker; the Japanese prenominal morpheme -no, in its alternations with -na and ø; and the competition between words and small syntactic constructions, such as those involving adjectival nouns. The general approach here leads to a view of the notion of 'economy of expression' which is directly linked to the morphological forms of the language, as opposed to some larger and perhaps less clearly motivated syntactic constructs.