Morphological Expression and Ordering in Korean and Japanese

要旨

This paper is concerned with three areas of Korean and Japanese morpho-syntax in which an account based on Optimality Theory seems to provide certain advantages of explanation and simplicity over previous ac­ counts. The areas discussed are : the interaction of the copula and genitive marker with structural case markers and other 'final' nominal suffixes, such as the topic marker; the Japanese prenominal morpheme -no, in its alternations with -na and;; and the competition between words and small syntactic constructions, such as those involving adjectival nouns. The gen­ eral approach here leads to a view of the notion of 'economy of expression' which is directly linked to the morphological forms of the language, as op­ posed to some larger and perhaps less clearly motivated syntactic con­ structs.

主題