Parsing Korean case phenomena in a type-feature structure grammar

Abstract

For a free-word order language such as Korean, case marking remains a central topic in generative grammar analyses for several reasons. Case plays a central role in argument licensing, in the signalling of grammatical functions, and has the potential to mark properties of information structure. In addition, case marking presents a theoretical and computational test area for understanding the properties of the syntax-morphology interface of the language. This is why it is no exaggeration to say that parsing Korean starts from work on the case system of the language. This paper reports the case system of the Korean Phrase Structure Grammar (KPSG) developed as a Korean resource grammar for computational purposes and implemented in the Linguistic Knowledge Building (LKB) system. The grammar adopts the constraint-based mechanisms of feature unification and multiple inheritance type hierarchies as an extension of HPSG (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar) and is proved to be empirically and computationally sound and efficient. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.