Conservative vs. Non-conservative Readings of Korean Numeral Classifiers

Abstract

The paper taps into conservative vs non-conservative readings of Korean numeral classifiers in Korean recently investigated in Ahn and Sauerland (2017) and Ahn and Ko (2022). We start with questioning the validity of Shin’s (2017) suggestion that postnominal and floating numeral classifiers are counterparts of English partitives and the latter are subject to the definiteness condition. We then review Ahn and Ko’s (2022) experimental study of floating numeral proportional classifiers, which reports that definite-marked host nouns/NPs result in giving rise to a conservative reading only, but non-definite-marked ones can produce a non-conservative reading, though less frequently than a conservative reading. But Ahn and Ko have a problem in constructing ‘indefinite’ conditions. Resolving this problem, we use our intuitive sense of grammaticality to examine the meanings of sentences containing numeral proportional and ordinary/sortal classifiers in different contexts. They can be interpreted in different ways depending on the context. The contexts relevant to the issue under examination are: whether host nouns/NPs are Case-marked or not, whether or not they refer to specific sets of entities, and whether the '-nun' particle om them is used as a topic marker or contrastive focus marker.