초록/요약

In this paper I investigated the interface problems of the Korean morphology. For this purpose I focused on Korean endings with respect to parts of speech on the one hand and word-formation on the other hand. So far Korean endings have not been treated as a kind of parts of speech especially in school grammar. However, if it is true that the definition of parts of speech follows from the classification of grammatical words which are minimal syntactic units, Korean endings have to get a status of parts of speech despite of the phonological dependence. This means also that the criterion ‘form’ for the classification of parts of speech in Korean must be removed or at least substituted by the criterion ‘distribution’. As a necessary consequence ‘conjugation’ which consists of ‘inflection’ with ‘declension’ does not exist in Korean any more. In some cases Korean endings also have been analyzed as a kind of suffixes in word-formation. This treat presupposed that word-formation process always include roots and suffixes only in view of inflectional languages. However, there are so many syntactically combined words including ‘Josa’ and endings in Korean. Therefore instead of being analyzed as suffixes, Korean endings in word-formation must be recognized as a peculiarity of Korean word-formation. The above things show that Korean endings are not interface elements but key points realizing the specificity of Korean as an agglutinating language on the whole.