Chapter 3 presents an overview of issues in Korean syntax. The specific chapters on syntax address topics that have received attention in both traditional and contemporary investigations of Korean (morpho) syntax, such as anaphora (Han) and nominalizations (Yoon), as well as some that have not previously been investigated in depth, such as Sino-Korean person-denoting nominals (Kim and Sells). The chapter on Right Dislocation (Ko) deals with a construction that received relatively little discussion in traditional or early generative analyses but has emerged as a central testing ground for contemporary debates on movement, ellipsis, and related issues. Finally, Kwon’s contribution deals with real-time processing of syntactic dependencies, which traditionally falls within the field of psycholinguistics. While the papers by Ko, Han, and Kwon are surveys, those by Kim and Sells, and Yoon are not, although the latter tries to situate the proposed analysis against the backdrop of longstanding debates in the analysis of lexical nominalizations in generative grammar. Overall, the collection of papers strikes a balance between familiar topics and newer, lesser-known, topics.

Chapter 15 investigates the feasibility of an all-syntax approach to lexical nominalizations in Korean. In addition to productive syntactic nominalizations, Korean possesses a rich inventory of deverbal, i.e., lexical, nominalizations. The consensus in the field since the advent of the Lexicalist Hypothesis (Chomsky 1970) that syntactic and lexical nominalizations are formed in different grammatical components has been questioned in recent approaches that advocate a unified syntactic analysis of all nominalizations. The investigation reveals that while there are lexical nominalizations that are argument-bearing, previous arguments purporting to support separation of complex event nominals and simple event, or result, nominals, ultimately do not go through in Korean. Examination of a class of lexical nominalizations that bear some hallmarks of syntactic derivation leads to the same conclusion. Thus, deverbal lexical nominalizations in Korean do not support the kind of unified syntactic analysis of nominalizations that is currently dominant in the literature.

Chapter 6 focuses on loan character transcription systems. Loan character transcription systems for Korean started with the transcribing of proper names. The next step involved the practice of interpreting or reading Chinese characters in the vernacular; finally, methods were developed for writing sentences in the vernacular using Chinese characters. These practices represent a widespread phenomenon, found in many nations and periods of history, whereby a foreign writing system is used to write a local vernacular, beginning with the simple practice of reading the foreign writing in that vernacular, a practice which has been called “vernacular reading”. In Korea, the initial stage of sentence-unit transcriptions involved simply transposing Chinese character (sinograph) texts from Chinese word order into Korean; this evolved to a stage where grammatical particles and endings, so-called t’o in the Korean writing tradition, were inserted into the text. Korean kugyŏl developed as a method of facilitating the vernacular reading of Chinese texts in Korean as they are read. Kugyŏl appears to date from the Shilla period.

Chapter 27 stresses the importance of connecting assessment with learning and of assessment prior to implementation of instructional design based on the backward design principle (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). Backward design contrasts sharply with the traditional approach of planning instructional activities first and designing assessment later in the general instructional process. It also urges teachers to set clear learning objectives as the first step of curriculum design. After offering a short overview of key assessment types for different purposes, it presents Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA: Adair-Hauck, Glisan & Troyan, 2013) model by discussing how language proficiency and skills in real use of grammar and vocabulary can be measured in actual performance assessment. Actual students’ outcomes after implementation of IPA in an Advanced Korean class are collected and analyzed based on rubrics that can be used as standards for scoring. The chapter also analyzes whether there are correlations between IPA results and Proficiency outcomes.

Chapter 13 introduces many recent studies on Korean anaphors using both off-line and on-line experimental methods to test structural and non-structural constraints on their interpretation and usage. The questions addressed include whether the anaphor is interpreted via binding or co-reference, whether and how much logophoricity or empathy determines the antecedent potential of the anaphor, the locality of the dependency between the anaphor and its antecedent, and the quantificational bindability of the anaphor. The chapter presents a synthesis of these experimental studies on various types of Korean anaphoric forms, caki, casin, caki-casin, and 3rd person pronouns.

Chapter 22 focuses on a unique phenomenon in the Korean case system – case alternations and stacking – as a case study to illustrate two opposing views of case in Korean: the structural case view vs. information structure analyses. A more fine-grained information structure-based account of case stacking is proposed, arguing that the phenomenon implicates focus embedded in the topic phrase.

Chapter 23 reviews the role of grammaticalization at different levels of grammar: phonological, morpho-syntactic, paradigmatic, and semantic-pragmatic. It first discusses the dischronic principles and mechanisms that have been proposed in previous grammaticalization studies. The chapter then examines the prominent patterns by source category, dividing these into nouns and verbs. In the nominal category, four source construction types are illustrated with the reanalyses that led to their emergence as grammatical forms such as postpositions, conjunctions, and auxiliaries. In the verbal category, four source construction types are illustrated, with special focus on the grammaticalization of de-verbal postpositions and auxiliary verbs. The chapter further addresses select aspects of Korean grammaticalization from a typological perspective. It discusses the productive use of affixes, converbs, and predicatives known as “mermaid constructions”, which are among the characteristics shared by many languages in the eastern Eurasian region. It also discusses the presence of large inventories of de-verbal postpositions and numeral classifiers.

Chapter 12 analyzes the phenomenon whereby various types of elements may appear in postverbal position in Korean: arguments such as the subject, the object, the indirect object, and clausal complements may be dislocated to the right. Moreover, a variety of non-argument projections such as adverbials, prepositional phrases, relative clauses, and small clause predicates may also appear in a postverbal position. The chapter focuses on two basic issues on RDCs: (i) whether the RDC involves a mono-clausal or bi-clausal structure and (ii) whether postverbal elements undergo movement or are base-generated. The chapter also looks into differences among sub-varieties of RDCs in Korean, as classified by the grammatical and semantic function of the Right-Dislocated material, the type of the correlate in the main clause, and the number of dislocated items. Cross-linguistic implications of the Korean data for the current research on RDCs in other languages such as English, Dutch, German, and Bangla are also discussed.

Chapter 10 continues with the discussion of prosodic phonology, but shifts the focus to the issue of how prosody relates to constituent structure in Korean. Korean is interesting because various segmental alternations are sensitive to different prosodic levels, thus providing a test case for prosodic phonology. Lenis stop voicing is a segmental alternation that correlates with the presence of a phonological phrase (Silva 1988; Cho 1990; inter alia). Moreover, intonation patterns coupled with segmental alternations supplant additional data for understanding prosodic structure in Korean. In Seoul Korean, an accentual phrase has been argued to have an LHLH accent; this unit also correlates with segmental alternations such as lenis stop voicing (Jun 1993). The sentence phonology of Korean offers insights into the general issue of the prosody-syntax interface and provides many kinds of evidence on how constituent structure affects the organization of sentence phonology. The chapter first reviews earlier research, then proposes a revised version of the general theory of the prosody-syntax interface.

Chapter 4 demonstrates that Korean has deeply influenced its immediate language neighbors: Japanese and Jurchen-Manchu. The Japanese-Korean parallels discussed here have often been presented as proof of their genetic relationship. However, the chapter argues that the overwhelming majority of these parallels are found only in Central Japanese, the Japonic language, with which Korean was in immediate and direct contact. On the other hand, most of the Korean-Jurchen/Manchu comparisons dealt with in this chapter have not previously been discussed. With few exceptions, they are found only in Jurchen and Manchu but not in other Tungusic languages. These exceptions are easily explained as loans from Jurchen or Manchu into the neighboring Southern or Northern Tungusic languages; they are never found in those Northern Tungusic languages, such as Ewenki and Ewen that are located outside of the area.

Chapter 7 deals with a longstanding controversy from both historical and theoretical linguistic perspectives. The chapter provides a description of Korean vowel harmony beginning with an overview of its historical and theoretical linguistic background. Middle Korean displays relatively rigorous patterns of vowel harmony; contemporary varieties show reduced but still complicated patterns that are confined to certain morphological contexts, as a result of historical changes. The description of Korean vowel harmony in this chapter is divided mainly into two parts: the relatively complete vowel harmony system in Middle Korean, and vowel harmony in contemporary (chiefly Seoul) Korean. The former provides an historical and typological overview of the productive MK patterns, while the latter focuses on the exceptions and variations of the remnant harmony patterns in ideophones and verbal inflections. The remainder of the chapter introduces a number of theoretical approaches, from early generative treatments to more recent Optimality Theoretic analyses.

Chapter 20 investigates the longstanding and controversial topic of the indefinite reading of so-called wh-words in Korean. The chapter reviews arguments regarding their historical development, typological observation, grammatical properties, and processing strategies.

Chapter 9 explores prosodic structure as an integral component of linguistic structure. Prosodic structure specifies how phonological constituents are to be grouped to form larger units within a given utterance; this is known as their delimitative function. Prosodic structure also helps determine which of phonological constituents are produced with prominence relative to the other constituents; this is known as its culminative function. These functions entail strengthening of segmental realization (prosodic strengthening), often leading to linguistic enhancement of syntagmatic and paradigmatic contrast. Theories of the phonetics-prosody interface assume that phonetic realization of the spoken utterance is fine-tuned according to prosodic structure. In turn, crucial aspects of phonetic realization signal higher-order prosodic structure for listeners.

Chapter 28 draws on findings from conversation analysis, pragmatics, and interactional linguistics studies of Korean language, to offer an overview of L1 Korean speakers’ routinized procedures and practices for turn-taking and repair organization, both of which are tied to the grammatical structures and pragmatic features of Korean. The discussion of each practice touches on pedagogical implications for L2 contexts, drawing on a number of recent empirical studies that have documented L2 interactional development processes.

Chapter 24 examines the topic of language and gender in the context of Korean studies. Korean is well-known for its highly sophisticated honorifics and other resources that index hierarchy, formality, personal closeness, etc. Korean speakers “perform” gender using politeness distinctions as a primary resource. Studying how gender is performed requires the examination of language and gender in local contexts as they are indexed and constructed. This chapter also looks at the relative frequency of men’s use of formal language such as caney “you”, yey “yes”, and the supnita style, in comparison to women. The result of this is that women may feel like “interlopers” in prestigious professions where formal language is the norm. On the other hand, as Korea is rapidly moving away from a hierarchical society and toward a more egalitarian one, informal language, including caki “you”, ney “yes”, the eyo style, and other patterns associated with women, is becoming preferred over formal language to some extent across genders. This is especially evident among the younger generation.