earticle

영어

This study applied to Korean the standard techniques (e.g., tense, case markers, etc.) which have been used to show that young children represent functional projections mainly for European languages, by focusing on Korean children’s production of mood morphemes. Based on what I found from the analysis of Korean CHILD database, I suggest that the over-use of the default mood-inflection ‘-e’ in the earliest speech of one Korean two-year old parallels root infinitive forms observed in other languages. I also found that the absence of inflectional morphemes and the absence of correlations between specific verb forms and null-subjects, or tense markers, seem to be consistent with the view that children initially have only lexical categories. Therefore, this apparently provides strong evidence for a prefunctional analysis of child Korean syntax. Despite this apparently strong evidence for a prefunctional analysis of child Korean syntax, I argue that the systematic presence of the linking morpheme ‘-ko-’ in truncated auxiliary verb constructions implies that at least some level of functional structure is represented, even when it is never produced.