The Korean Case System: A Unified, Constraint-based Approach

Abstract

One of the most complex phenomena in Korean is its case system. In addition to canonical case assignment patterns, it displays intriguing phenomena such as case stacking, case alternation, case on adverbs and verbal elements, and so forth. This paper extends the idea of the previous lexicalist analyses of Korean case such as that of Bratt (1996), Yoo (2002), and Choi (2003), and develops a constraint-based system that allows more tight interactions among lexicon, syntax, and semantics. Lexicon provides concise, flexible, non-redundant information syntax specifies appropriate constraints in combining words or phrasal elements with proper case information lexical semantics restricts the right semantic case value on the predicate's argument(s). This analysis allows us to provide a unified approach for the various case patterns in Korean and is much simpler in capturing the aforementioned case phenomena with more broad coverage.