Joon (hongi) wrote in linguaphiles,
Joon
hongi
linguaphiles

Bit of background, I'm a heritage listener (speaker isn't really appropriate) of Korean. I'm trying to improve my Korean and so currently I'm reading a book called 'Korean Grammatical Constructions: Their Form and Meaning'. The writer is a linguist, Jaehoon Yeon at the School of Oriental and African Studies, UL. He doesn't seem to be a kook in other words.

In one of his chapters, he goes into detail about the Double-Nominative construction, where stative verbs have more than one NP marked with the nominative case.


He gives examples like:

Suni-ka     emeni-ka        yeppu-ta.
Nom      mother-Nom beautiful-Dec
'It is Suni, and only she, whose mother is beautiful'.

or

sensayngnim-i   elin sonca-ka             ttok-ttokha-ta
teacher-Nom    little grandchild-Nom  bright-Dec
It is the teacher, and only he, whose little grandchild is intelligent.

I of course don't trust myself on grammaticality judgements on Korean, so I asked my sister and her friends what they thought of it. They're all native speakers, either from the Seoul area or Gyeongsang-do. They reject the above statements outright and say they don't make sense. I tried to make a distinction between 'would you as a native speaker say this' and 'could you say this' in order to see if they were reacting to the ungrammaticality of the sentence. They said it was just wrong.

But I can't believe that a linguist (and he seems to be a native speaker himself) would publish something that is so demonstrably wrong. So what party do I side with here?
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  • Anatomy of a "CUNT"

    The word CUNT is not simple, but compound. It consists of two parts. However, first of all, let's get rid of prejudices. The word CUNT is as…

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    The letter Q looks like the letter O , but with a small tail at the bottom. Could the name of the letter Q relate to this tail? It is…

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