The Semantics of amu N-to/-ilato/-ina in Korean: Arbitrary Choice and Concession

This paper reports the syntactic distribution of amu-N-to/-ilato/-ina phrase, which are representative polarity sensitive items. (PSIs) in Korean, and ac- counts for their semantic characteristics in therms of "arbitrary choice quantification" and "concession" In the first section, we extensively illustrate the distributional behaviour of the PSIs in various costructions and roughly generalize the distribu- tion in terms of "(anti/non-) verdicality" Section 2 claims amu denotes an arbi- trary choice quantifier and the particles -to/-ilato/-ina as "concessive" markers, so the compounds denote a special element in a pragmatic scale determined by con- text/situation, Section 3. based on the pragmatics of scalar implicature, accounts for the apparent ambiguity of PSIs between "universal"and "existential"readings and further characterizes the difference among the concessive markers -to/-ilato/-ina in terms of "quantity/ quality scale."rkers -to/-ilato/-ina in terms of "quantity/ quality scale."