In this paper, I discuss the nature of the optionality of the morpheme te in phrasal comparatives in Korean. I first show that the morpheme te is used only as the comparative degree morpheme, unlike the morpheme more which can also appear in metalinguistic comparatives. I further show: (A) In phrasal comparatives that respect parallelism (exhibiting the semantics of direct comparison), the morpheme te can optionally appear, while (B) in pure phrasal comparatives that do not respect parallelism(exhibiting the semantics of indirect comparison), its presence may or may not be permitted, depending on speakers and/or syntactic contexts; and (C) it tends to obligatorily appear in clausal comparatives. I suggest that (B) is the case because the morpheme te can trigger the semantics of indirect comparison for some speakers, but not for others, and also that there are two te's: the morpheme te that triggers the semantics of direct comparison and the morpheme te that triggers the semantics of indirect comparison (which I call te* here). As for (A), by assuming that phrasal comparatives which respect parallelism can be ambiguous between derived and "base-generated," I suggest that the optionality of te (not the optionality of te*) can be attributed to derivational ambiguity: Derived phrasal comparatives require the presence of the (phonologically-overt) morpheme te (just as clausal comparatives do) while "base-generated" phrasal comparatives may not, employing covert te. During the discussion, I show that certain phrasal comparatives (which I call PP phrasal comparatives) tend to require the presence of overt te to suggest (I) that they should be considered derived from clausal comparatives, and (II) that -pota ('than') can select only a noun phrase, complex or simplex.
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