The semantics and pragmatics of case marking in Korean: A role and reference grammar account

The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate how case marking is determined in Korean. My hypothesis is that the answer lies in the interaction between semantics and pragmatics. Many previous approaches rely on purely formal properties to account for Korean case masking. By assigning NOM/ACC marking a minimal functional load, the previous approaches fail to provide much insight into the question of why NOM/ACC case marking plays such an important semantic and pragmatic roles in Korean. It will be argued that the distinction between semantic vs. pragmatic case is needed to account for Korean case marking.;The presentation of this research takes on the following organization. Chapter 1 describes the purpose and scope of this study. Chapter 2 describes the theoretical features of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). Three major aspects of RRG will be presented: the morphosyntactic structures, the theory of lexical decomposition and semantic roles, and information structures. Chapter 3 analyzes Korean 'grammatical relations' in RRG. I will propose that 'semantic' and 'pragmatic' relations themselves should be used for controlling case marking in Korean. It will be proposed that there are two syntactic pivots in Korean: semantic pivots controlling clause-internal processes like honorification and reflexivization and pragmatic pivots controlling cross-linguistic grammatical processes. Chapter 4 describes the distinction between semantic case and pragmatic case, and provides the characteristics of pragmatic case. Chapter 5 investigates the interaction between information structure and case marking. Some double nominative constructions such as 'stative psych verb construction', 'locative NOM construction', 'alienable possessor ascension construction', and "type' and 'class' construction' and some double accusative constructions such as 'causative verb construction' and 'cwu 'give'-type construction' will be argued to involve pragmatic NOM/ACC case in them. Chapter 6 is devoted to the interaction between Aktionsart/transitivity and case marking. The accusative markers on the locative and frequency adverbial nominals and the 'verbal noun' in the HA construction will be argued to involve semantic case resulting from accomplishment semantics. Chapter 7 is devoted to the discussion of case marking in the clauses involving NP-level and clausal-level juncture-nexus. This chapter shows how juncture-nexus types and other factors interact with each other for case marking. Chapter 8 is an application of the semantic vs. pragmatic case distinction and other RRG notions to Korean first language acquisition data. The purpose of this chapter is point out some problems of previous analyses of the development of Korean case marking and to provide an alternative analysis in terms of semantic vs. pragmatic case and other RRG notions. Chapter 9 concludes this thesis by briefly summarizing the proposed analyses.