Kasus und Wortstellung im Deutschen und Koreanischen

Abstract

This research is about the relation between case and word order in German and Korean. One assumption is that case has the abstract topic (top) and focus (bottom or down) function [ToPi]. The top and bottom functions of the case rearrange the basic word order of the nominal sentence elements. In contrast, the German case does not have this lexically semantic and pragmatic meaning. Its character is structural or syntactical. It is dependent on the properties of the predicate, the context of discourse, accent and intonation of the speaker. The topic and focus functions [ToPi] of the German case are therefore influenced by the factors that change the German word order. The Korean case is combined in the lexicon with semantic and pragmatic meaning of the determinator that corresponds to the case morphemes in Korean. It is related to the German case, independent of any information of predicate, discourse context, stress and emphasis. The Korean case is thus lexical or morphological: The top and down functions [ToPi] of the Korean case are not strong. under the syntactical and semantical conditions of predicate and non-grammatical features. As a result, the Korean word order is freer than the German.