Korean is spoken by approximately 70 million (Lee and Ramsey 2000: 1, Yeon 2003:\n17) people mainly on the Korean peninsula. Many varieties exist also outside the\npeninsula, reaching from Northern China far out to Central Asia. This database\nshows valency properties of Modern South Korean (henceforth Korean, see also\ndiscussion below) which is based on the dialect of Seoul (see Song 2012),\nalthough contrary to standard sources such as Sohn (1999), an emphasis has been\nput on what is commonly used in spoken usage.
\nKorean is an agglutinating language with a basic word order often stated as SOV,\nalthough it may be flexible depending on information structure and discourse\nfactors. Word order may become less flexible as soon as case markers are\ndropped, and whenever there are double nominative or double accusative\nconstructions (see comments on ordering resources though).
\nThe genetic affiliation of Korean is notoriously disputed, with three different\nmain stances on this: The first stance is that Korean is an Altaic language (Lee\n2008), the second that it might be distantly related to Japanese (Lee and Ramsey\n2000), and the third that it is simply a language isolate (Sohn 1999).\nEspecially the latter suggestion is highly misleading:
\nFirstly, monographs such as Lee and Ramsey 2000 explain that it is probable that\nmultiple related languages were spoken by ancient kingdoms, and probably the\nlanguage of Shilla gave rise to what is now considered Korean. However, data\nseems to be scarce and not much can be said about the different languages spoken\non the Korean peninsula during that period.
\nSecondly, a huge deal of socio-politically motivated language ideology is\nobvious, yet far too often overlooked in Korean linguistics (and beyond), and it\nis curious that with 'Korean' we almost always refer to Modern Standard South\nKorean. Prescriptive movements and over-standardisation (see Park 2010) seems to\nbe a popular sociolinguistic practice fed by nationalism and high pride of one's\nown language. As a consequence, regional variation is commonly downplayed within\nKorean linguistics, and as a result, material on variation of Korean covers\nrelatively few linguistic areas and is generally very dense (see King 2006, for\nexample).
\nThe past years have seen an ongoing change of perception, at least in\nnon-capital parts of Korea as well as international linguistics. Although not\nwidely acknowledged yet, Jeju spoken in Jeju Province has been classified as\na critically endangered language (Moseley 2010), and renowned figures in the\nfield of endangered languages and Korean linguistics (Matthias Brenzinger, p.c.\nand William O'Grady, p.c.) support the view that Korean is only a language\nisolate by ideology, but not by empirical fact, since it should more\nappropriately seen as constituting a small Koreanic language family of at least\ntwo languages (see Kang 2007 for a rough sketch of Korean's little sister\nlanguage Jeju).
\nKorean uses case marking to flag verbal arguments. Syntactically, case markers\nmay be affixed to simple nouns and noun phrases. The syntactic status of case\nmarkers is disputed, with some counting them all as postpositions (see Yeon\n2003: 22 or Sohn 1999: 293 for an overview); and also the number of different\ncases is not agreed upon. Case stacking is possible on nouns. Case markers are\ncommonly dropped in colloquial speech and give rise to certain ambiguities. The\ndifferences between colloquial and literary Korean have not been acknowledged\nenough in the literature, and some of the content of this database might seem\nwrong to some scholars who have been trained in a Korean schooling system. The\nappearance of nominative and accusative case markers may depend on discourse\nfactors similar to differential argument marking (see Lee and Thompson 1989, as\none of few studies), with more extreme (but certainly more interesting) studies\nsuggesting that Korean 'case' markers might not be case markers at all (cf.\nSch\u00fctze 2001).
\nNote that with respect to the dative case marking, there seems to be sort of\na differential marking in Korean where only animate nouns can receive dative\nmarking, and inanimate nouns in corresponding functions receive locative\nmarking.
\nKorean verbs do not inflect with respect to person, number or gender. A special\ncase might be the agglutination of the honorific suffix -si- which is coreferent\nwith an A or S argument, and never co-occurs with the first person being the\nsubject of a verb due to sociolinguistic motivations.
\nMany scholars (for example Yeon 2003: 18 or Sohn 1999: 293) see Korean as\na scrambling language where the order of constituents is fairly free as long as\nthe predicate comes last. This conclusion has been drawn on the simple\nobservation that as long as every NP in a sentence bears case marking, putting\nthe constituents in different order does not seem to lead to ungrammaticality.
\nFrom the viewpoint of how Korean is actually used, the generalisations on Korean\nword order are far too simplistic. As shown in a few examples in this database,\nfor example one in the layout for GIVE, case markers are not employed as often\nas a reference grammar might suggest, and the lack of case marking on NPs often\nleads to strict word order. Furthermore, in cases where we have double\nnominative or double accusative constructions the word order of the verbal\narguments is fairly fixed. There are interesting studies on Japanese however\n(cf. Hinds 1981) which suggest that this 'fixed' word order might exist only in\nthe 'intuition' of a native speaker (or more specifically, my humble self),\nsince it has been reported that Japanese grammarians frequently utter the same\nthread of thought, although actual spoken Japanese shows that the abovementioned\nword order variations might well be possible under certain conditions.
\nAs Sohn (1999: 293) himself mentions, \"in actual utterances, a speaker tends to\nplace an animate, definite and/or specific noun phrase before the other noun\nphrases\", and observing 'free word order' in Korean should rather be taken with\na pinch of salt.
\nAlso, Korean word order and case marking seems to ineract in a very complex way\nwith information structure, referentiality and definiteness. This is an area\nthat has been widely neglected in the study of Korean. The study of these areas\nshould show that Korean word order is by far not that 'liberal' as is constantly\nreiterated in grammatical descriptions.
\n\"Regularly\" means that a verb in the alternated form under discussion is\ngrammatically acceptable and common to me. \"Marginally\" means that subjectively,\nI have not come across these constructions very frequently, or that a verb in\nthis alternation sounds quite odd, maybe because I would not use the verb that\nway but rather use an alternative paraphrase. It can also mean that I am simply\nnot sure if you can say that this way because I have never had the need to. As\nyou can see, verbs marked as \"marginally\" are marked as such more various\nreasons which may depend more on my individual meta-linguistic judgment. For\nthis reason I have always tried to avoid ticking this option as much as I could.
\nThe data is based on introspection of the contributor (Soung-U Kim),\na German-born male linguist of Korean descent, as well as on the grammatical\njudgment of two persons consulted for his BA thesis (completed in 2011), with\ntwo other persons consulted in 2013/2014 during the elaboration of this\ndatabase. Whenever the grammatically of an expression does not seem to be\nuniversally acceptable, I indicated it in the comment field. Sometimes I googled\nthe existence of some forms I use (in order to maximally exclude idiolectal and\nbilingual interference), but I am aware that this method may have its pitfalls\nas well and should be seen under a sceptical eye. Note that although I did not\nreceive Korean schooling, I spent several years in Korea as a child, with\nSouthern Jeolla Korean being my L1. I am well aware of the problems of data\ncollection through introspection, and surely studies on Korean with a much\ngreater range of native speakers (who have grown up in Seoul) will show much\nmore reliable data than the present set. I hope that the present database can\nrather give some 'nudges' into directions of more sophisticated research.
\nA lot of 'verb entries' are either complex predicates or tend to be used as\nsuch, and I have given some information in each entry. As mentioned, a special\nemphasis has been put on the naturalness of certain verb forms and constructions\n(see FRIGHTEN, for example), and contrary to well-known sources such as Yeon\n(2003) I have decided basic coding patterns rather following my intuition on the\nnaturalness of a construction in informal usage, and several examples show\nspoken Korean which differs quite strongly from the Korean normally shown in\ngrammars.
\nThe transcription of Korean follows the regulations of the Revised Romanisation\nof 2000. Primary texts in examples indicate the actual pronunciation of Korean\nmorphemes (largely excluding phonological changes happening across wod\nboundaries), with the spacing following the Korean script. The analyzed text\nstrictly follows a phonemic representation, which also applies to the verb\nentries. The glossing follows the Leipzig Glossing rules. The original script\nfields sometimes contain differently romanised examples from existing monographs\nin English.
\nPersonal pronouns only exist for 1st and 2nd person. However, for third person\ndemonstratives sometimes I have chosen 3SG as their gloss since demostratives in\nKorean can be quite complex, involving a three-way distinction into proximal,\nmedial and distal, and behaving much like nouns in terms of the affixes they can\ntake on.
\nWhenever a verb is discussed here that is actually included in the database,\nI tried to write it in capital letters.
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