국어 어미 연구의 나아가야 할 방향

The purposes of this paper are to survey the problems of the studies on Korean endings and to present the directions for the future studies. In chapter 3, this paper considers the function of Korean endings and their grammatical categories. There are many endings in Korean which have more than one syntactic functions. In relation to this, earlier studies tended to pose negative attitude to dividing them depending on syntactic functions. However, there is no way to explain them by one function except semantic point of view. This paper argues that their various functions are a kind of syntactic layering due to historical development and that we need to research them by functional and quantificational approach. In chapter 4, this paper considers the syntactic characteristics of Korean endings. Korean is an agglutinative language. Nevertheless, traditional studies have been regarding Korean endings as a kind of inflectional elements. Recent studies showed that Korean endings are attached to phrases, not to words, and subject to gapping. This means that Korean endings are syntactic units and attaching them is not inflection, but agglutination. If then, we need to research the syntax of agglutination including various functional categories and head-movement. (Yeungnam University)