Emphatic ku in Korean as an anaphoric degree intensifier

• 발행기관: 경희대학교 언어정보연구소
• 저자명: Kyumin Kim Emily Elfner
• 간행물 정보: 『언어연구』제43권 제2호, 377~401쪽, 전체 25쪽
• 주제분류: 인문학 > 언어학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2026.06.30

국문 초록

This research investigates the syntax of emphatic ku in Korean, which expresses the strong surprise of the speaker at an unexpected situation. Studies on emphatic ku are scarce except for two recent studies. One is Kang (2018)’s study on the pragmatics of ku, and the other is Kim and Elfner (2025)’s study on the prosodic properties of ku. However, neither of these have addressed the syntax of emphatic ku in detail. An important property of emphatic ku is that it has to appear with a gradable adjective, which has been noted but not addressed in the previous studies. Taking this distribution of emphatic ku seriously, this paper analyzes emphatic ku as an anaphoric degree intensifier: being anaphoric, it projects idxP (indexP), and as a degree intensifier, it merges in the specifier of the Deg(ree)P, an extended functional projection of adjective. This analysis is informed by the analysis of same in English, in which it is an anaphoric element that merges in DegP (Hanink 2021a). An interesting consequence of the proposed account is the unification of the morpheme ku in various contexts as an anaphoric pro-form, which shows a strong parallel to a pro-form that appears in kind and degree contexts in a wide range of languages.

목차

1. Introduction

2. Emphatic ku and anaphoric ku

3. idxP in DegP: The case of English same

4. Emphatic ku, idxP, and DegP

5. Consequences: Ku in emphatic, kind and other contexts

6. Conclusion

References

키워드

emphatic degree index anaphoric adjective

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