There are two opposing views on the status of Structural Case (SC) particles in Korean. One view claims that the particle has its own lexical meaning which is usually discourse-related. The other holds just the opposite and claims that the particle is...
There are two opposing views on the status of Structural Case (SC) particles in Korean. One view claims that the particle has its own lexical meaning which is usually discourse-related. The other holds just the opposite and claims that the particle is a realization of Case which is uninterpretable. In this article, I show that all arguments presented in Ko (2002) for the former view do not hold. Noting that the widely-held view that an SC particle corresponds to a D runs counter to the latter view, I also show that such a view cannot be correct. Finally, I suggest an alternative structure, in which an SC particle is not allotted any structural position in narrow syntax.