The Adjective Class
in Korean
1
Ho-min Sohn
1. A typological profile of Korean
With a total of approximately 75 million speakers, Korean is the national and na-
tive language of the mono-ethnic Korean people living in North and South Ko-
reas. The current population of South Korea is over 46 million and that of North
Korea around 23 million. Some 5.5 million Koreans are estimated to reside outside
of the Korean peninsula, the major countries with a large Korean population being
the USA (2.1 million), China (2 million), Japan (700,000), and the former Soviet
Union (500,000).
Typologically, Korean, like Japanese, is a language of head-final AOV- and SV-
order syntax. All kinds of modifiers precede their heads. All particles are postpos-
itional, while all inflectional affixes indicating tense, aspect, honorific, modality,
and clause type are suffixed to the predicate that occurs at the end of a clause. It
is an analytic language with a typical agglutinative morphology, in that a series
of suffixes and particles are attached respectively to predicates and nominals in a
fixed order with clear-cut meanings and functions. Korean is a 'dependent-mark-
ing' language, in that the syntactic functions of core constituents are shown mainly
by case marking and postpositional particles associated with core NPs.
In Korean, there is a clear syntactic and morphological distinction between
nouns and verbs. The major syntactic function of nouns is the head of NP. The order
of occurrence among constituents in a noun phrase is (i) relative clause, (2) geni-
tive construction, (3) demonstrative, (4) specifier, (5) the head noun, and (6) case
and/or delimiter particles, but the first three elements can be scrambled for stylistic
purposes. The major syntactic function of verbs is the head of predicate. All Korean
verbs require a clause-type ender. Clause-type enders include sentence-type enders
(indicating declarative, interrogative, imperative, prepositive, and promissive),
(^1) This is a revised version of the paper I presented at the International Workshop on Adjective
Classes held at La Trobe University in August 2002.1 appreciate R. M. W. Dixon and A. Y. Aikhenvald
for providing me with valuable comments and suggestions on the earlier version. I take this oppor-
tunity to thank them sincerely for inviting me to the impeccably well-organized workshop and giv-
ing us generous hospitality.