A Phrasal Analysis of Korean Comparatives

Comparatives in many languages are canonically classified into phrasal and clausal types, but each language employs its own morphological and syntactic ways to express these. Even though Korean also appears to have both phrasal and clausal types, there are empirical reasons to doubt this dual classification, for this language. This paper raises two basic questions. First, should we treat phrasal comparatives and clausal comparatives in a uniform way as suggested for English in previous literature? And second, does the language have `clausal comparatives" syntactically or semantically at all? In answering these two questions, the paper shows that Korean phrasal comparatives are not derived from clausal sources, and even its clausal comparatives are nominals headed by the formal pronoun kes. Using Kennedy"s (2007) distinction between individual and degree comparison for typological variation in comparatives, we suggest that Korean comparatives involve only individual comparison in which orderings between two objects are expressed only by individuals. This is different from English, which has both individual and degree standards.

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