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Article published In: Language and Linguistics
Vol. 22:2 (2021) ► pp.302–337

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Marking definiteness in an articleless language

The role of the domain restrictor KU in Korean

 | Hankyong National University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 17 April 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00084.kan
Abstract
The main purpose of this paper is to identify the novel type of Korean definiteness marker. Especially I show that Korean KU which originated from the morphological demonstrative ‘that’, instantiates a solid pattern of distribution of definiteness marker. Mainly focusing on the semantico-pragmatic role of KU, the proposal comprises three main parts: (i) Given that Korean employs distinct devices teased apart into uniqueness (i.e. referential use) and familiarity (i.e. anaphoric use) in its definiteness system, I show that the effect of referential use in argument saturating function is achieved by the covert “determiner” in bare nouns, whereas anaphoric use in argument non-saturating function is achieved by the overt KU; (ii) The semantic contribution of KU is analyzed as a domain restrictor (DDR; Etxeberria, Urtzi & Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2010. Contextual domain restriction and the definite determiner. In Recanati, François & Stojanovic, Isidora & Villanueva, Neftalı (eds.), Context-dependence, perspective and relativity (Mouton Series in Pragmatics 6), 93–126. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) which supplies an indexical property as an argument (Schwarz, Florian. 2009. Two types of definites in natural language. Amherst: University of Massachusetts at Amherst. (Doctoral dissertation.)Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2013. Two kinds of definites cross-linguistically. Language and Linguistics Compass 7(10). 534–559. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Jenks, Peter. 2018. Articulated definiteness without articles. Linguistic Inquiry 49(3). 501–536. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar); (iii) I further show that the DDR operator is present in the syntax, falling out from the standard D position as an adjunctive modifier in a lower DP layer. The contribution of my work is that the proposed account allows us to widen our view of cross-linguistic variation to cases where the prerequisite of definiteness is based on the dissociation of meaning (i.e. the semantic role of D as encoding familiarity) and form (i.e. the syntactic role of D as an argument-building function).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background on definiteness
  • 3.Data: Core properties of definite KU
    • 3.1Familiarity
    • 3.2(Anti-)uniqueness/maximality
    • 3.3Domain restriction
  • 4.Analysis: KU as a contextual domain restrictor
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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