Korean (Spoken Korean as used in and around Seoul), Example 124

Comment:

Although superficially one might assume that this looks like a reciprocal alternation, a detailed look might reveal that this is not the case here. The reciprocal seoro in Korean behaves similarly to a noun in that it can take various case markers, and although it denotes semantic reciprocity, I am not sure whether this holds syntactically, since the above case pattern is still NOM-ACC, and it would not sound grammatical to leave seororeul out here (although this needs to be tested on a corpus given that in Korean NPs can be dropped). Moreover, switching the order of anna-wa 'Anna-COM' and tomaseu-ga 'Thomas-NOM' as in a 'true' reciprocal alternation sentences results in ungrammaticality (*Thomaseuga Annawa seororeul kkyeoanatta, compare with ex. 213). This shows that the nominative case marker has its scope over the comitaitve marked NP, and the latter seems to be embedded in an NP headed by the noun tomaseu. Thus what I am trying to say here is that probably this construction, although semantically reciprocal, syntactically exhibits a 'normal', transitive NOM-ACC coding pattern.

Type:

Constructed by native speaker linguist