A Unifying Theory of Topic, Conditional and Relative Constructions in Korean: a Case for Archimorpheme Across Syntactic Categories.

Abstract

This thesis is an attempt to establish an interrelationship among three syntactically distinct categories in Korean, namely, the topic phrase, conditional clause, and relative clause. It is demonstrated that these three seemingly unrelated categories are interrelated with each other both morphologically and semantically. The -(u)n element in the conditional marker mye-(u)n is identified morphologically as the topic marker. The analysis of the relative marker un shows that the form of the relative marker un is essentially the same form as that of the topic marker un. It is argued that the use of the form un is each of the three expresses the notion of the speaker's contrastive choice. It is also shown that the semantic feature common to both conditional and relative clause constructions is that of 'presupposition'. The conditional clause as an antecedent to the main clause can be interpreted as expressing a presupposition with respect to which the propositional content of the main clause is to be understood; and also what is conveyed by a relative clause is, logically speaking, a type of presupposition required to properly interpret the semantic relation of the head noun to the predicate of the matrix clause. To further strengthen the ultimate tripartite relations among these three categories, it is argued that the syntactic restriction on the occurrence of two topic markers in one basic clause on the one h and , and the oddities that result from using the topic marker within a conditional clause or within a relative clause on the other h and , strongly support the fundamental sameness in the semantic nature of the three surface categories. To account for these phenomena, a new abstract linguistic level is proposed: the 'archimorpheme', to accommodate the manifestation of a single underlying semantic category in more than one syntactic category without interfering with the different syntactic functions that the form may have.