The Types of Korean As-Parenthetical Constructions

This paper is primarily intended to provide a new insight on which the structural properties of As-Parenthetical constructions shown by Potts (2002) might be regarded as cross-linguistically common one. As a first attempt, it introduces the characteristics of Korean As-Parenthetical by carefully investigating them through the data, focusing on the similarities or differences between two languages with a constructional theoretical perspective. The paper here provides three properties of Korean as-clauses in the morphological and syntactic aspects. First, the morpheme 'as' in English as-clause would be realized as three different morphemes as a bound one. Korean as-clauses can be introduced by three different morphemes, '-tusi, -chelem, -taylo' and unlike that in English as-clauses, they behave as bound morphemes which do not stand alone. Even though they are attached into different morpho-syntactic stems, they do not make any meaning change only under this clause. Secondly, two syntactic types of as-clauses can also be found in Korean, similarly to those of English: CP-As type and Predicate-As type, depending on which types of gap they involve in. English has one more subtype of Predicate-As type (called inverted Predicate-As clause), while Korean does not show this subtype. Thirdly, the various mismatches attributed by the gap and the antecedent come from the constructional restrictions of as-clauses in Korean. In addition, the paper attempts to display various ambiguities from the as-clauses through disjoint references or negative sentences in As-Parenthetical constructions.