earticle

영어

The 'subject' has been recognized as an essential element of the sentence in discussions about the Korean grammar. This is attributed to the traditional idea that Korean sentences are analysed structurally as constituting 'subject+predicate'. However, the notion of 'subject' is a mere hypothetical entity, whose validity for the grammar has never been questioned and justified. While many grammarians have taken the notion of 'subject' for granted, they have never provided a clear definition and evidence for it. In fact there is no evidence proving that the subject is a necessary sentential element in Korean; in other words, there is no legitimate marker for the subject. In addition, a closer examination of the previous works on the subject reveals that their discussions contain many logically contradictory statements. The current article claims on these two facts that the syntactic category of subject does not exist in the Korean grammar.