Demarcating the Border between Information Units in Korean

Abstract

There has been different traditions in analysing Korean sentences in terms of information structure, and the basic terms of a name have been used differently depending on the different assumptions about their syntactic statuses. In this paper, I offer a perspective of viewing information structure as formal phenomena in the level of discourse and thus define the basic terms of information structure in Korean systematically. On the other hand, information units in a sentence have their own information statuses in their textual or situational contexts. In this research, I review the preceding approaches of similar perspectives and reclassify the expressional instantiations of the Korean information units. In this approach, I argue that in analysing sentences in terms of information structure it is desirable to see them function as constraints to the information structure in general, because they are not encoded formally and affect distributional realizations of topic and focus separately. On the basis of the system above, I discuss the four issues in demarcating the border between information units in Korean: the linguistic encoding of topic and focus each, interactions between the scope of information structure, which is the same as the one of speech act, and the ones of other functional categories, and lastly, the interrelation between the case-markers ellipsis and focus realization. Meanwhile, I suggested that, firstly, the ratified topic in Korean can be realized only by word order without the topic marker neun, secondly, neun-marked nominals preceding a verb can be interpreted as an event topic, together with the verb as a whole and it has [+verum] feature as its matching focus unseen. Thirdly, I showed that the scopes of foci separate them from the presuppositions of the utterances they are in and, therefore, the semantic interpretation of each sentence should be interpreted as the dynamic conjointness of its presupposition and its assertion(the speech act). Finally, I made a counterargument to the pervasive idea that case-markers in Korean mark focus and pointed out that we need to see the same data with a different angle, that is to say, the case-markers within a focus is difficult to be omitted.