A Critical Review of Language Typology: for the subjecthood of Korean linguistics

언어유형론의 비판적 고찰 한국어는 교착어, 불어는 굴절어라는 것의 의미를 묻다

Korean linguistics or linguistics In Korea has the viviparous limitation that on the one hand, it was influxed from Europe and Japan and on the other hand, these days the American linguistics takes the initiative in Korea. That's why Korean linguistics cannot be free of the problems of 'dependence/independence', 'central/marginal', etc. It calls for two conditions to study the nature of Korean itself and to establish the independence of Korean linguistics in this situation. The first condition is that we should reveal some peculiarities of Korean in itself. The second condition is that we should reveal universals of Korean by comparing it objectively with other languages which are typologically and genealogically different. 1 think the first is important but the latter is more important. To meet the second condition, we analysed the expansion structure of NP in Korean and French, and suggested a new tree-diagram for describing equivalently the NP structure of the two languages. As for VP structure, we suggested some possibilities of comparing the final endings in Korean with personal pronouns in French, and of comparing the prefinal ending 'si' in Korean with the second plural pronoun 'vous', etc. As a result of the comparison of Korean and French, we came to conclusion that Korean is a inflectional agglutinative language while French is a agglutinative inflectional one. In other words, they are same in 'typus', are different in 'topos'. This may be a surprising/unexpected conclusion. But this, we think, can lead us to much closer approach to the nature of the two languages Korean and French.