Korean comparative constructions: A constraint-based approach and computational implementation

The complexity of comparative constructions in each language has given challenges to both theoretical and computational analyses. This paper first identifies types of comparative constructions in Korean and discusses their main grammatical properties. It then builds a syntactic parser couched upon the typed feature structure grammar, HPSG and proposes a context-dependent interpretation for the comparison. To check the feasibility of the proposed analysis, we have implemented the grammar into the existing Korean Resource Grammar. The results show us that the grammar we have developed here is feasible enough to parse Korean comparative sentences and yield proper semantic representations though further development is needed for a finer model for contextual information. 1 Types of Korean Comparative Constructions Comparison constructions, involving comparing two participants in terms of the degree of some gradable property relating to them, are encoded differently in each language. Korean also employs quite different morphological and syntactic properties from languages like English and even Japanese (cf. Kim and Sells 2010). As illustrated in the following two main types of comparatives in (1), Korean uses the optional comparative marker te ‘more’, the postpositional standard marker pota ‘than’ as basic elements in forming comparatives (cf. Jhang 2001, Choe 2008, Kim and Sell 2009): (1) a. tongsayng-i hyeng-pota chayk-ul (te) manhi ilkessta young.bro-NOM old.bro-than book-ACC more many read ‘The younger brother read more books than his older brother.’ b. tongsayng-i [[hyeng-i ilk-un] kes-pota] (te) manhi young.bro-NOM old.bro-NOM read-MOD kes-than more many ilkessta read ‘The younger brother read more than his older brother did.’ Phrasal comparatives (PC) in (1a) involve two compared nominals whereas clausal comparatives (CC) in (1b) have core clausal properties. With the strong motivation for capturing the truth conditionally identical meaning between phrasal and clausal comparatives, it is commonly assumed that phrasal comparatives are derived from clausal sources through deletion rules (cf. Bresnan 1973, Pancheva 2006, Bhatt and Takahashi 2007). To see if all Korean comparatives can be grouped into these two clausal and phrasal types, we extracted comparative sentences from the sample examples in the verbal (vv) and adjectival (va) lexical entries of the Sejong Electronic Dictionary (compiled on the basis of the 100 million words of the Sejong Corpus): †This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation Grant (KRF-2009-A00065).