‘-음’과 ‘-기’의 문법 범주에 대한 일고찰

Grammatical Category of ‘-im' and ‘-gi'

In modern Korean, some constructions, particularly '-im' or '-gi' ones, are clearly identified as distinct derived nouns or gerund, while others are unclear in their grammatical categories. Those constructions that belong to the latter possess the characteristics of the derived noun which is modified by adjectives, of gerund which is modified by adverb, or of gerund that has a subject. Such characteristics pave a way to the discussions on the grammatical category of '-ɨm' and '-gi': whether they are derivational suffixes or inflectional endings. This paper argues that the grammatical category of '-im' and '-gi', that shows the characteristics of both noun and verb, is the nominal ending. In particularly, this paper explicitly shows that a nominal form of a verb or a gerund can be modified by adjective, which establishes a strong ground of support for arguing that the construction under investigation is the nominal form of a verb. In addition, this paper insists that a word and a syntactic construction must be distinguished strictly and that synchronically no syntactic constructions can be considered as a word. Accordingly, as already confirmed, all the syntactic constructions belong to the realm of syntax and thus excluded in the discussion of morphology before they are listed in the lexicon through diachronically lexicalized procedures.