Among the previous approaches to the analysis of the Korean copula -i-, some assume that it is the stem of a regular verb and some others assume that it is a “syntactic suffix.” The aim of this paper is to show that the copula is neither a syntact...
Among the previous approaches to the analysis of the Korean copula -i-, some assume that it is the stem of a regular verb and some others assume that it is a “syntactic suffix.” The aim of this paper is to show that the copula is neither a syntactic suffix nor a regular verb but a clitic verb. The suffix hypothesis cannot account for its syntactic independence, while the regular verb hypothesis cannot explain its phonological dependence on its host. We will see that the clitic analysis best captures both the syntactic and phonological characteristics of -i-. We will focus more on pointing out problems of the two types of approaches rather than on proposing a new clitic approach.