earticle

영어

This paper aims to investigate “double nominative ‘ka’ construction” based on spoken and written language in corpus which consist of a million words each. Findings; First; the usage frequency of double nominative constructions is only 1% that of the nominative marker ‘ka’. Second; the percentage use of double nominative ‘ka’ construction in spoken language is three times more than that in written language. Third, some adjectives, which require two thematic roles, make double nominative constructions at a rate of only 0.08%. Lastly, save for those adjectives, there are only a few verbs which make double nominative constructions, like ‘nada(나다)’, ‘neomda(넘다)’. According to these results, we suggest that nominative ‘ka’ has distinct functions at the syntactic and pragmatic levels, in addition to a function as a nominative marker at the morphological level. At the syntactic level, it could correspond with subject, on the assumption that sentence constituents and cases should be distinguished. Meanwhile, nominative ‘ka’ could be a focus marker regarding new information at the pragmatic level. Thus, it is unnatural to have double nominative ‘ka’ in a clause, because communication will be more effective when there is only one focus.