분열문의 초점 부분에 나타난 ‘것’

‘Kes’ in the Focusing Part of Korean Cleft Construction: An Individuation Morpheme

Verb phrases and clauses need to be nominalized by kes when they are focused in the kes-cleft construction in Korean, even though non-nominal categories are otherwise allowed in the focus position. This paper offers a solution to this puzzle from the fact that (i) the categories that can be focused by the adverb ‘palo’ coincide with the categories that can occur in the focus-position of the kes-cleft constructions, (ii) ‘palo’-focuses and cleft-construction focuses are identificational and exhaustive, and (iii) the kes-cleft construction and all the categories focused by ‘palo’ include an individuation morpheme such as noun or ‘-seo.’ This paper proposes that the kes-nominalization of focused verb phrases or clauses follows since the exhaustivity is induced by the semantic operator EXH (Brody and Szendrıi 2010) and the operator is located in the individuation morpheme such as the noun, -seo, or kes in Korean.