Context Sensitivity, Late Merge, and the Plural Marker ‘-tul’ in Korean

Abstract

The plural marker ‘-tul’ in Korean as a nominal suffix is attached on a countable noun via a morphological/lexical process since the distinction like human vs. non-human nouns that determines the ‘-tul’ suffixation evidently reflects their lexical semantics. This paper shows that on top of their lexical properties, the structural contexts where nouns are situated play a decisive role in the insertion of ‘-tul’ in Korean. Concentrating on nominals composed of host nouns and numeral classifiers, we note that bare forms of non-human countable nouns tend to be resistant to the insertion of ‘-tul’ on them since they strongly prefer to denote a kind. But non-bare (i.e., Case-marked or modified by a demonstrative/ possessive) forms of countable nouns as well as bare forms of human nouns can denote an entity as well as a kind, hence feeding the insertion of ‘-tul’ on them. On the other hand, when preceded by the pre-nominal numeral classifier with Genitive Case maker, host countable nouns can be optionally attached with ‘-tul’ since the numeral classifier and ‘-tul’ overlap in meaning. To accommodate the distributional properties of ‘-tul’ determined by structural contexts as well as lexical features, we propose that the Korean plural marker is a modifier inserted via Late Merge onto host nouns/NPs in a point of derivation. The proposed idea will be shown to be most effective in accounting for the empirical aspects of ‘-tul’ that have been too elusive to capture in Korean syntax.