| This study attempts to understand the case morphology on arguments and non-arguments in Korean. Korean allows more than one occurrence of accusative case morphology in a single sentence. The syntactic objects that can bear accusative case morphology include arguments, VP-internal topics, and measure expressions. The resulting multiple accusative structures can be divided into an inalienable possession type, a zooming-in type, and a measure expression type.; A standard approach to case in natural languages focuses on arguments. Chomsky (1981) claims that a DP needs case to be licensed in the syntax, and that a DP licensed by case is visible for thematic role assignment at LF. Assuming that case is closely related to case morphology, this approach provides a neat account for arguments with case morphology, while non-arguments with case morphology are considered to be trivial. The understanding of case morphology in general, however, requires an investigation of the case morphology on non-arguments, in addition to the case morphology on arguments.; A multiple accusative structure, which involves more than one accusative argument, does not necessarily require a revision of the standard approach to case. For instance, the inalienable possession type of the multiple accusative structure employs a recursive VP structure with two different verbs. Being arguments of each verb, the possessor and the possessee are assigned case and bear accusative case morphology. The inalienable possession relation between the two accusative arguments has its root in the material part-whole relation between events.; The presence of accusative topics, and accusative measure expressions, however, leads us to rethink the nature of case morphology. Case morphology is domain specific (i.e., accusative case morphology occurs within VP) and is a default morphological particle of the domain. Non-arguments with case morphology use these properties of case morphology for various purposes. For instance, accusative case morphology can be used to link a topic that occurs within VP (an In-Field topic) to a syntactic constituent that corresponds to the comment part (i.e., VP) of the topic. Accusative case morphology is used as a default morphological particle unless lexically specified morphological particles such as postpositions are used (e.g., Kiparsky 1973). Measure expressions can also bear case morphology. These include Split Classifier Phrases, Split Amount Phrases, and measure adverbials. Since measure expressions cannot measure the target directly, they measure out events and relate the measurement to the intended scheme, such as cardinality of individuals, temporal trace, etc., with a help of the homomorphism. Measure expressions are sensitive to the syntactic position where they occur. Since case morphology is domain specific, case morphology is used to indicate the position of a measure expression. This study reveals that non-arguments can bear case morphology due to the very properties of case morphology: Its status as a morphological default and its domain specificity. |
