This paper strives to characterize the singular use of the possessive marker wuli in Korean, frequently interpreted as ‘our’. Focusing on its singular use and plurality, we argue that wuli is no plural form of nay ‘my’, but that it just marks in-group membership. It is shown that the apparent plurality of wuli only arises as a by-product of the in-group membership marking. It is also presented that age and gender are important factors in selecting between wuli and nay.

The main goal of this paper is to describe and analyse intensifiers, especially non-head-bound-intensifiers (NHBIs), which can be included in the discussion and analysis of these elements as focus particles. In doing so, NHBIs such as Korean susulo, casin/cache, English x-self and German selbst are dealt with in a rather cross-linguistical perspective. The pure and strict comparison between Korean, English and German is not intended. This paper is mainly concerned with the semantic domain where the respective contributions of the expressions in question overlap, which offers the common base for the discussion regarding Korean, one of the non-European languages and English and German, two European languages. They share the semantic domain ‘intensification’ regarding relevant subject-NP. They introduce an ordering distinguishing center and periphery. In contrast to head-bound-intensifiers (HBIs), however, NHBIs add self-involvement (directness of involvement) of subject-NP to the meaning of the relevant sentence. I adopt the proposals of Konig (1991), Primus (1992) and Siemund (2000) in the treatment of intensifiers as focus particles. However, I reject Konig (1991) that just NHBIs talre scope over a whole clause, Primus (1992) that NHBIs focus VPs, not NPs, and Siemund (2000) that NHBIs can be further devided into two groups, viz. NHBIs with exclusive readings and NHBIs with inclusive readings. Evidence for my position is presented mainly in the course of describing and analysing some syntactic properties and the meaning and use of NHBIs. I come to the conclusion that both the common meaning of intensifiers as focus particles and the common meaning of NHBIs of three languages can be represented by a simple logical formalism.

Coordination in natural language is often syntactically explained by the rule schema X \longrightarrow X′ and X", where X′ and X" refer to expressions of a like syntactic type. While this schema does explain a lot of instances of coordination, it is well known that this schema also gives rise to serious structural ambiguity, leading not only to numerous unintended interpretations but also to a high degree of unnecessary computational complexity. In order to identify intended interpretations, we need to take into account a number of clues at all the levels of morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics/discourse. In this paper, we propose, with an accompanying data analysis, principles of symmetry and coherency for an effective and reasonable identification of intended interpretations from coordination-bearing sentences.

This paper introduces a computerized version of the Korean Standard Pronunciation Rules that can be used in speech engineering systems such as Korean speech synthesis and recognition systems. For this purpose, we build Petri net models for each item of the Standard Pronunciation Rules, and then integrate them into the sound conversion table. The reversion of the Korean Standard Pronunciation Rules regulates the way of matching sounds into grammatically correct written characters. This paper presents not only the sound conversion table but also the character conversion table obtained by reversely converting the sound conversion table. Malting use of these tables, we have implemented a Korean character into a sound system and a Korean sound into the character conversion system, and tested them with various data sets reflecting all the items of the Standard Pronunciation Rules to verify the soundness and completeness of our tables. The test results show that the tables improve the process speed in addition to the soundness and completeness.

In recent years, many organizations have been constructing their own large corpora to achieve corpus representativeness. However, there is no reliable guideline as to how large corpus resources should be compiled, especially for Korean corpora. In this study, we have contrived a new statistical model, ARIMA (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average), for predicting the relationship between linguistic items (the number of types) and corpus size (the number of tokens), overcoming the major flaws of several previous researches on this issue. Finally, we shall illustrate that the ARIMA model presented is valid, accurate and very reliable. We are confident that this study can contribute to solving some inherent problems of corpus linguistics, such as corpus predictability, corpus representativeness and linguistic comprehensiveness.

This paper attempts to provide an alternative analysis involving categorical issues related to English gerunds. Especially, this paper rejects Maulof's approach that creates a new syntactic category gerund by mixing nominal and verbal categories. This paper identifies two syntactic structures in English gerunds: nominal gerunds and verbal gerunds. This distinction is based on syntactic and semantic characteristics of each type and is intended to account for the external distribution and endocentricity of the construction. Treating verbal gerunds syntactically as verbal categories, this paper proposes that English verbal gerunds act like other verbal categories such as infinitives whereas nominal gerunds behaves much like derived nominals. This paper proposes a few lexical rules that can take care of the two types of gerunds. The proposal can be extended to prepositional complements as well as sentential subject positions. This proposal not only resolves the issues involving distributional properties of the gerund construction but also captures syntactic parallelism observable between gerunds and other verbal constructions in English.

The progressive in English is taken to be an operator which takes a non-stative predicate and returns a predicate which denotes a process with a temporal frame around some definite time or event. When, it is combined with a predicate which has a culmination in the event, the sentence means that the culmination has not come yet. So the event denoted by the base predicate is not true at the current time. On the other hand, when it is combined with a predicate which has no culmination in the event, the event denoted by the base predicate is taken to be true. In this paper, this is explained by the semantics of the progressive based on the notion of contributiveness. I propose that a progressive sentence is verified by some subevents which are contributive to the current situation and the progress of the event beyond the threshold level of the event denoted by the base predicate. A sub-situation is contributive if the addition of it to the previous situation is more likely to lead to the whole situation than the previous situation.

Korean displays an interesting construction (so-called possessor agreement construction), where a possessor nominal and its possessum nominal are marked with the same case as shown in the example Mary-ka John-ul tali-lul cha-ss-ta ‘Mary kicked John's leg’ More interestingly, not all possessors in possessive construction are marked the same case with its possessum as shorn in the ungrammatical sentence ＊Mary-ka John-ul cha-lul cha-ss-ta ‘Mary kicked John's car’. Hence, a simple but non-trivial question arises: In what situation are both possessors and possessums marked with the same case\ulcorner In this paper, we advance three claims: (i) Possessor agreement appears in the situation where entailment is satisfied as follows: If Mary kicked John's leg, it entails that Mary kicked John, (ii) entailment in possessor agreement results from theta-feature sharing; specifically, the whole DP and the possessor DP share the same theta role, and (iii) Possessor nominals are marked with accusative (or nominative) case when they are assigned internal theta role from the predicate directly.