주어표지 ‘-에서’와 ‘-께서’의 통사적 구분

The Syntax of ‘-eyse’ and ‘-kkeyse’ as a Subject Marker

The honorific subject marker ‘–kkeyse’ and the group subject marker ‘–eyse’ in Korean have often been considered to be the realization of structural case. In this paper, however, it is argued that based on the possibility of cooccurrence with topic markers, focus markers and delimiters, ‘–kkeyse’ and ‘–eyse’ cannot be structural case markers. Considering its semantic properties and distributions as well as its historical development, we claim that ‘–eyse’ when used as a subject marker is partitive. For the honorific subject marker ‘–kkeyse’, there are enough arguments that [Honorific] cannot be an agreement feature and hence ‘–kkeyse’ is not realization of structural case. These taken together strongly suggest that subject markers are not necessarily structural case markers and that subject markers which are not nominative carry some specific meaning.