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영어

The purpose of this paper is to show that Korean Case-licensing System can be more clearly explained by phase. In order to prove that Case can be licensed by phase in Korean, it is important to determine what the nominative case licensor is. In this paper, following Kim (2005), we assume that a complex of inflectional elements may license nominative Case in Korean, and ,without any objection, transitive verbs may license accusative Case. However, there arise some problems in languages like Korean because Case can be realized multiply. We adopt Covert Multiple Agree proposed by Hiraiwa (2001), in order to solve the problems mentioned the above. Unfortunately, we also find that there are some problems with his analysis. As a solution to the problems, we propose Case-licensing by phase: within CP phase nominative Case is licensed because nominative Case licensor, a complex of inflectional elements, is located within the phase and within v*P phase accusative Case is licensed because accusative Case licensor, v, is located within the phase. Under such an assumption, we also propose that Korean Case be licensed in two ways. One is by operation Agree by which φ-features of probe and goal are checked and Case feature is checked as a reflex of the φ-features. The other is by phase. Since elements which have no φ-features can not enter into operation Agree and, consequently, can not be licensed by Agree, their Cases are claimed to be licensed by another operation, namely, by phase: if an element is within CP phase, nominative Case would be license, since the phase is the domain of nominative Case. On the other hand, if an element is within v*P phase, accusative Case would be licensed since the phase is the domain of accusative Case.