Decomposing -(e)ci and bare inchoatives in Korean

Korean deadjectival verbs have two forms. First, there are predicates that do not require additional morphemes from their stative forms to mean a change of state, hereafter referred to as bare inchoatives. The other type of inchoatives must combine with the morpheme -(e)ci- after the root form to contain the meaning of the change of state. The bare inchoatives reach the absolute standard of degree achievements as a result of the change of the state, while -(e)ci denotes the event where the degree property of an entity becomes greater than the previous one. This -(e)ci morpheme has been traditionally considered as a BECOME operator. This paper, however, proposes an alternative semantic analysis of -(e)ci morpheme and its syntactic structure by adopting the concept of the measure of change function. The bare inchoatives have one degree phrase (DP), while the -(e)ci inchoatives are decomposed into two degree phrases. Furthermore, the -(e)ci morpheme is assumed to be the realization of a typical functional degree head. (University of Delaware)