This study investigates morphologically complex nouns in Korean through a series of priming studies. Two experiments examined whether morphological affixes on Korean nouns were decomposed or processed as a whole. Two types of morphological affixes were examined: morpho-syntactic case markers and the plural marker '-tul'. Results showed that priming occurred for the plural marker with SOAs of 80 ms and 160 ms, but no priming occurred for the morpho-syntactic case markers. These results suggest that the morphological processing for these two types of affixes differ. We argue that Korean nouns with the plural suffix are decomposed into the stem and affix, supporting the Decomposition Model (Pinker & Ullman, 2002). We suggest that while plural markers are truly morphological affixes, case markers in Korean are morpho-syntactic, and thus presuppose the existence of other syntactic elements, such as the matrix verb, hence the lack of priming effects.

Conditional sentences also can be formed by inversion of subject and auxiliary, but it happens only in a limited environment. This paper addresses grammatical constraints in conditional inversion and how they behave differently from the regular conditional clauses based on corpus investigations. Our corpus search reveals many different types of conditional inversion constructions, indicating the difficulties of deriving inverted conditionals from movement operations. In this paper, we provide a construction-based approach to the inverted conditional construction. The paper shows that the most optimal way of describing the general as well as idiosyncratic properties of the inverted conditional constructions is an account in the spirit of construction grammar in which a grammar is a repertory of constructions forming a network connected by links of inheritance.

TimeML is a markup language for events and temporal expressions in natural language, proposed in Pustejovsky et al. (2003) and latter standardized as ISO-TimeML (ISO 24617-1:2009). In this paper, we propose the further specification of ISO-TimeML for the Korean language with the concrete and thorough examination of real world texts. Since Korean differs significantly from English, which is the first and almost only extensively tested language with TimeML, one continuously run into theoretical and practical difficulties in the application of TimeML to Korean. We focus on the discussion for the consistent and efficient application of TimeML: how to consistently apply TimeML in accordance with Korean specificity and what to be annotated and what not to be, i.e. which information is meaningful in the temporal interpretation of Korean text, for efficient application of TimeML.

This study investigates the binding behavior of the Korean anaphor 'caki', which has been regarded thus far as a long-distance anaphor (LDA). Given that even local anaphors can be bound long-distance when they function as exempt anaphors in certain languages (Pollard and Sag 1992; Kim and Yoon 2009a, b), I investigated the binding behavior of LD-bound 'caki', in order to determine whether LD-bound 'caki' differs from LD-bound 'caki-casin' in the same contexts. In the experiment, subjects were required to rate the grammaticality of Korean sentences representing various types of LD binding of 'caki' and to determine whether the sloppy or the strict reading was more prominent in elliptical VPs containing the anaphor. The results are discussed with respect to the typology of LDAs proposed by Cole, Hermon and Huang (2001).

Some terms related to "meaning" in semantics are reviewed, particularly those used in Lyons' famous semantics book Semantics 1 and Semantics 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1977). Since Lyons' book is so comprehensive that the semantic terms used in that book cover almost every important notions/terms used in contemporary semantics. With relevant interpretation of the terms, we suggest most appropriate Korean translations, trying to give different translations for different English terms. Terms covered include: 'signify, signification; reference/refer/referent, sense; denotation/denote, connotation/connote; extension, intension; implication/imply, implicature/implicate, entailment/entail; designate, demonstrate/demonstrative'.