Formatives in Korean
Sungho Choi · 2012
This paper claims that formatives in Korean are non-mandatory sentential elements, which is a major feature in their syntactic behavior that differentiates them from inflectional elements of familiar Indo-European languages (including Russian and English), whose mandatory appearance in the sentence is regulated by the grammar of sentence-formation. It is suggested that they should be termed agglutinatives precisely for this reason. The consequences that derives from this feature are as follows: (1) Korean formatives are non-redundant in their semantics, thus being additive and never elliptical, (2) no zero formatives could possibly be posited for agglutinatives, (3) they have phrasal domain as their syntactic scope, while constituting a phonological unit with their formal host, and (4) neither inflectional paradigms nor inflection classes, which are established for those languages with inflection, are possibly posited for the Korean grammar.