Dative Selection, Case Alternation and Case Stacking in Korean

The Korean dative nominal suffix -eykey alternates with nominative or accusative on certain arguments. These arguments can bear various semantic roles. This paper shows that the semantic variety can be reduced to a unique semantic factor, i.e. location, by adopting Davis (2001) lexical decomposition theory. In addition, this paper claims that the so-called dative in Korean does not belong to the same system of morphosyntactic opposition as nominative or accusative. Instead, I posit two HEAD features: CASE, with possible values nom and acc; OBL, with possible values dat, ins, com, etc. In this paper, the case alternation is due to the possible four types of nouns resulting from the distribution of CASE and OBL features. In addition, the occurrence of the dative case is constrained by semantic compatibility between dative marked NPs and head verbs. This approach provides an intuitive analysis for the Korean dative while considerably reducing the burden on the lexicon.