Bound Noun cwul in Korean

This paper discusses the synchronic and diachronic analysis of the bound noun cwul in Korean. Like other bound nouns, it needs to have some aid from other phrases. The main focus of previous studies centers around the meanings of the bound noun cwul, ‘way/ability’ and ‘factive/non-factive’ (An 2005, Hong 2003, Oh 2015, inter alia). However, the behavior of cwul differs between these two meanings: ‘factive/non-factive’ shows much wider distribution than ‘way/ability’ (An 2005, Hong 2003, Oh 2015, inter alia). A subject NPI with suppletive negation can be licensed in the case of ‘way/ability’, but ‘factive/non-factive’ does not allow this pattern. Also ‘non-factive’ is allowed to be at the sentence-final position in recent usages (Jung 2010). In this paper, I argue that the bound noun cwul has two different structures. ‘Way/ability’ has a similar structure to the bound noun swu given in Kim (2014) that an external argument does not merge in [Spec, vP], but in [Spec, TadnP] and subsequently moves to [Spec, nP]. On the other hand, ‘factive/non-factive’ diachronically underwent a structural reanalysis from N to C and became a complementizer.