| 초록 |
Song, Kyung-An & Lee, Eun-Ha. (2020). Some issues of the Korean case considered from a typological perspective. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 28(2), 15-28. This paper examines some issues of the case description of Korean in a typological perspective. As a base of the discussion we explore the origin of the term case in the European tradition and compare this with the terms of Korean grammar. The term case originated from the Greek word ptosis which means fall, a spatial concept. In Korean grammar several terms were proposed. But they are all functionally defined, rather than spatially. In the European tradition the case was restricted to nominal functions which are marked by the inflectional forms. But this definition cannot be applied to Korean in which the nouns are not inflected. We need a broader definition of case. The European cases might be classified as inflectional case thereby. In Korean cases are marked by the postpositions and there are so many postpositions with diverse functions that it is not easy to specify the exact number and kinds of cases. Depending on grammarians the number of cases in Korean varies from two to twenty four. This paper suggests that we do not need to restrict the number of cases in Korean. Finally we examine three individual cases of Korean grammar and the results suggest as follows. Beside the postposition -i/-ga, the topic marker -eun/-neun should be counted as a nominative marker. The adverbial case is not an appropriate categorization of case. The cases which are included in this category should be counted as separate ones. The predicative case marker -ida corresponds to the copula in language typology, and it cannot be considered as a case marker. |
