The dative marker eykey/ey in Korean has some special properties. It alternates with structural cases, nominative or accusaitve. Subjects of psych verb constructions can take either dative or nominative. Indirect objects of ditranstive constructions can take either dative or accusastive. Another well-known property is that it allows case stacking. One of the two structural cases, nominative and accusative, can be added on top of it. More specifically, the nominative case ka can be added to a dative subject, resulting in -eykey-ka and the accusative case lul can be added to a dative object, resulting in -eykey-lul. Some claim that a structural case and an oblique case are realized together (I.-C. Choi 2003, 2004) and others claim that two structural cases are stacked , due to structural movement(J. Yoon) or due to advancement in the case strata (C. Youn(1995, 1998) and Gerdts and Youn (1988, 2002). The paper claims that structural cases are stacked onto the dative in order to resolve ambiguity that the dative marker intrinsically has. Following Y. Choi (2007, 2008a, 2008b), I adopt the position that case markers direct structural combination in the left-to-right fashion in dependent marking languages like Korean. When the dative case directs syntactic combinations, it intrinsically has an ambiguity. A nominal it is attached to can be either a subject or an object of ditransitive constructions, or an adjunct marking location (goal or source). Scrambling possibility in Korea makes it harder to identify the grammatical function of the dative marked nominals. I claim that case stacking is mechanism to resolve the ambiguity at a very early stage.
1. Introduction
2. Previous Approaches
3. Dependent Marking Parameter and Case Stacking
4. Conclusion