224 Ho-min Sohn
conjunctives, relativizers, and complementizers (including the infinitive suffix -el
-a). Such enders must always occur at the end of a VP as suffixes.^2
Korean is often called a free-order language. As long as the predicate-final con-
straint is maintained, the NPs in a clause can be scrambled rather freely for stylis-
tic purposes. This practice must be due to the fact that Korean has a large number
of case-marking particles, including nominative and accusative ones. Other things
being equal, however, the most neutral order is subject first, indirect object second
to last, and direct object last, with other oblique cases (locative, source, goal, direc-
tion, instrument, etc.) in between.
Korean is an honorific language. Sentences can hardly be uttered without the
speakers approximate knowledge of his social relationship with his addressee and
human referent in terms of age, social status, kinship, in- or out-groupness, and/or
the speech act situation. Honorific forms appear in address-reference terms; human-
related nouns and verbs; pronouns; case particles; verbal suffixes, and, above all, six
different speech levels (deferential, polite, blunt, intimate, familiar, and plain).
Korean vocabulary consists of native words (approx. 30 per cent), Sino-Korean
(SK) words (approx. 65 per cent), and loanwords (approx. 5 per cent). Some 90 per
cent of loanwords are from English and the rest are from Japanese, German, Por-
tuguese, Dutch, Italian, and other languages. Except for some adverbs, all SK and
loanwords have been introduced in the Korean lexicon as nouns regardless of their
original word classes in the source languages. Therefore, to function as predicates,
the original verbal or adjectival words have gone into compounds, most produc-
tively with the native verb/adjective hata 'do, be'. Due to the overwhelming number
of SK words, there are many native-SK doublets or near-doublets.
2 The adjective class in Korean
While most traditional and contemporary grammarians and lexicographers dis-
tinguish between verbs and adjectives in Korean, several linguists including Mar-
tin (1992) and Yu (1998) view Korean adjectives as belonging to the class of verbs.
Martin (1992: 88-9) assigns all the inflected words (i.e. verbs, adjectives, and cop-
ulas) to the class of verbs, dividing it into transitive and intransitive, including
adjectives or 'descriptive verbs' in the intransitive, and assigning the copulas as a
sub-set of descriptive verbs.
Yu (1998) argues that unaccusative verbs are more similar to adjectives than to
unergative and transitive verbs in certain morphosyntactic behaviour and there-
fore the division between the class of adjectives and that of verbs is not fully jus-
tified. There are, however, many significant morphosyntactic, as well as semantic,
features that call for the division between the two classes, as will be elaborated in
what follows.
(^2) For this reason, the meaningless citation suffix -ta is attached to verb stems in dictionary entries
and citation purposes, as we do in this chapter, as in kata go', co/ita'good', and ita 'be' where ka-, coh-, and
i- are respective stems. The Yale romanization system is followed in transcribing Korean examples.