Abstract

This paper investigates the morphosyntactic status of Korean “particles”, which should be reanalyzed as affixes, clitics, or (regular) words. Despite their central role in Korean grammar, few studies have acknowledged the presence of clitics in the language. Building on the foundational analysis in Chae (2020), this study revises and extends previous claims in two key directions. First, following Chae (2023a), we argue that the particles -i/ka and -ul/lul, conventionally treated as nominative and accusative case markers, are more accurately analyzed as delimiters with identical meanings. This reanalysis has broad implications for constructions traditionally explained in terms of case marking. Second, we propose a new lexical category of “verbal postpositions (vPs)” to account for sentence endings, thereby eliminating the need to posit a complementizer phrase (CP) at the sentence level. We argue that the CP analysis is both conceptually and empirically problematic, since CPs are typically selected by elements within the sentence.