The morphological, syntactic, semantic category of ‘-i-’ in ‘-ida’ construction

The purpose of this paper is to make claims as follows. First, the syntactic category of ‘-i-’ in ‘-ida’ construction is verb; second, the morphological category of ‘-i-’ is suffix; third, ‘-i-’ is polysemous; fourth, among listemes saved on a long-term basis in lexicon, it becomes a syntactic atom, i.e., a word that is a productive linguistic unit (here as ‘-i-’) that can be combined with syntactically complex units, and can be directly used in syntax online; fifth, a word formed by so called syntactic word formation via head movement is in fact an ‘ecel(Gram)’. Gram is not a syntactic unit, but a morphological unit. It seems not too far from the truth to say that the recent debates of ‘-ida’ construction is not as much about describing grammatical facts, but so much about the coalitions of grammatical perspectives. In chapter 3, I pointed out that the syntactic derivation suffix theory has considerably distorted native speakers’ intuition about the concept of Korean word. And I also pointed out the syntactic word formation is not in fact a word formation, but a Gram formation. Since a Gram cannot be a syntactic unit, consequently, it cannot be formed in syntax. A Gram may not be formed in the lexicon either; as it is a complex unit that contains highly productive constituents. Therefore, a Gram needs not be saved, and cannot be saved in the lexicon. One alternative component to take charge with Gram formation may be morphology which takes charge of word formation and word analyses. In chapter 4, I have defined ‘-i-’’s morphological category as agglutinant suffix. According to it, Korean, as one of agglutinative languages, cannot have declensional suffixes, and ‘-i-’ in ‘-ida’ cannot be a derivational suffix, either; but it is just an agglutinant suffix that has [+dependency] feature, as a result, that must agglutinate to the preceding elements. In sum, in order to accordingly deal with ‘-ida’ construction, we need to re-define the fundamental units of syntax, morphology, and semantics, respectively. In addition, we may forsake the idea that the input of one grammatical unit be the output of another grammatical unit.