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영어

Korean is an agglutinative language where grammatical categories are realized with morphemes. As compared to Indo-European languages which are inflecting languages, Korean grammatical forms are relatively simple and regular. Further, ellipsis is rare phenomena in Korean grammar. Taking these into consideration, issues and methods for a study of Korean grammar must be determined by careful examination of grammatical characteristics observed in the empirical data rather than by grammatical theories proposed for Indo-European languages. The word order of Korean sentences has been described as ‘SOV’, but this generalization is couched in terms of sentence structure of Indo-European languages. There are many utterances that do not have ‘subject’. Further some sentences appear to have more than two ‘subjects’, and there is no fixed ordering between subject and object. This necessitates a careful reexamination of the traditional generalizations: the generalization that a sentence consists of subject and predicate and the generalization that the concept of ‘subject’ is necessary for a sentence structure in Korean. This study analyses sentences as consisting of ‘topic+comment’, not of ‘subject+predicate’. Accordingly, word-order in Korean should be described in terms of ‘topic’ and ‘comment’. This ordering of ‘topic-comment’ is very strict, and so is the ordering of ‘modifier-modified’.