Interactions between (pseudo-) cleft and copular constructions in Korean

The Korean noun kes (‘thing, fact’) has a variety of uses. Among these, it can be involved in different types of constructions which appear to be counterparts of clefts and pseudoclefts in English, and these are the focus of our paper. These cleft-like uses of kes also involve the copula, and we argue in this paper that the kes-constructions simply inherit the information structure properties of copular clauses, and have no special syntax of their own. The key aspects in the analysis of kes are (ⅰ) whether the phrase that it heads is referential or not and (ⅱ) where the partition in the copular clause between GIVEN and NEW information falls.