Case marking in Korean auxiliary verb constructions

Abstract

This paper deals with case marking in auxiliary verb constructions (AVCs) in Korean, and investigates how the case marking pattern in AVCs can be explained in terms of structural case resolution in the spirit of Pollard 1994, Heinz & Matiasek 1994, and Przepiórkowski 1999. In this paper, a new set of data involving various combinations of auxiliary verbs is presented to point out problems for both transformational analyses based on head movement and previous HPSG analyses in which the final auxiliary verb solely determines the case of the complements of the whole complex predicate. This paper shows that while most auxiliary verbs "inherit" the case marking property of the preceding verb, the auxiliary verbs siph- 'want' and ha- 'act like' have an additional property of assigning nominative and accusative case, respectively, to their complements. The actual case assignment by these auxiliary verbs is made possible, however, depending on what other kind of auxiliary verbs they are combined with. Based on the complex predicate analysis of AVCs, this paper proposes that complicated case patterns in AVCs can be accounted for by classification of verbs/auxiliary verbs via distinct feature values and by the mechanism of structural case resolution.