9 The Adjective Class in Korean 227(4) Native
kkoch-tapta (flower-) 'flower-like' pom-tapta (spring-) 'spring-like'
sanay-tapta (man-) 'manly' sikol-tapta (country-) 'of a rural
character'
SK
ceng-tapta (affection-) 'friendly' hakca-tapta (scholar-) 'scholar-like'
kwunin-tapta (soldier-) 'soldier-like' yeca-tapta (woman-) 'ladylike'
In addition, there are a wide variety of adjective compounds consisting of noun
- adjective as in caymi-issta (interest-exist) 'funny', him-tulta (power-enter) 'diffi-
cult', and mas-epsta (taste-lack) 'tasteless', or adjective + adjective as in kwut-seyta
(hard-strong) 'strong'.
Many synchronically simple, monomorphemic adjective stems end in a vowel - p across many semantic types. Examples are mukepta 'heavy', kakkapta 'near',
maypta 'spicy', mipta 'hateful', etwupta 'dark', chwupta 'cold', ttukepta 'hot', swipta
'easy' (swita 'rest'), wusupta 'funny' (wusta 'laugh'), akkapta 'precious' (akkita
'value (something)'), mulepta 'itchy' (multa 'bite'),pankapta glad to see' (pankita
'rejoice at'), culkepta 'happy'(culkita 'enjoy'), kulipta 'missed' (kulita 'yearn after'),
maykkulepta smooth' (maykkul 'smoothness'), noyepta 'offended' (no 'anger'), and
kwiyepta 'cute' (kwi 'esteem'). The vowel + p or simply -p appears to have once been
an adjective formative attached to a noun or a verb stem, which is frequently not
identifiable at present.
3 Grammatical properties of the adjective class
Dixon (Ch. i) proposes two parameters for recognizing adjective class types. The
primary parameter is whether adjectives can fill an intransitive predicate slot (I
type: 'verb-like adjectives') or fill a copula complement slot (II type: 'non-verb-like
adjectives'). The second parameter is whether adjectives within NP can take some
or all of the morphological processes applying to nouns (A type: 'noun-like adjec-
tives') or can take none of them (B type: 'non-noun-like adjectives'). Thus, there are
roughly four general adjective types.
(5) Type i: (I) verb-like and (B) not-noun-like
Type 2: (II) not-verb-like and (A) noun-like
Type 3: (I) verb-like and (A) noun-like
Type 4: (II) not-verb-like and (B) not-noun-like
Korean belongs to Type i in that adjectives fill not a copula complement slot but
an intransitive predicate slot. When adjectives occur within NP, they take no mor-
phosyntactic processes applying to nouns, such as definiteness, number, case, pos-
sessor, possessed, and NP head. The grammatical properties of the Korean adjec-
tive class are similar to those of verbs in functioning as predicate head in both
main and embedded clauses, taking similar morphological processes. There are