Dr. Kyumin Kim & Emily Elfner

Demonstrative ku in Korean: its syntax and prosody

Since Akmajian and Jackendoff (1970), it has been observed that in English stress on definite expressions such as a pronoun prohibits coreference, which extends to demonstrative nominals (Umbach 2002; Beller 2011, 2013), as shown in (1).

(1) Jack kissed Mary.

a. I hate that creep.             

b. I hate THAT creep.     (Beller 2011)

The demonstrative ku ‘that’ in Korean seems to show a similar pattern to the stressed demonstrative in English (1b). It has a well-known anaphoric use that requires a co-referring antecedent in the previous context (e.g., Lee 1989, 1994; Chang 2009; Ahn 2017; Park 2020; Kim 2024 among many others). Interestingly, it also has an emphatic use which requires prosodic prominence, as noted in the Korean literature (Lee 1995, Suh 2002, Kang 2018). In its emphatic use (KU, hereafter), as shown in (2), an anaphoric reading is not allowed (2ii), but it has a mirative reading which expresses speaker’s emotional attitude of strong surprise (2i) (Kang 2018). 

(2) (Kim-i)         KU      masiss-nun      twupwu-lo

Kim-Nom     KU       delicious-Rel    tofu-with

masep-nun        yoli-lul      mantul-ess-tani!

unsavory-Rel     dish-Acc   cook-Past-Excl(i)

‘Oh, (it is unbelievable that) Kim cooked an unsavory dish withthat much delicious tofu!’(ii) *‘Kim cooked an unsavory dish with that delicious tofu.’  (Kang 2018) In this talk, we examine the emphatic use of the demonstrative ku, and compare it to its anaphoric use. We address the following questions (i) whether stress on emphatic KU expresses focus, as suggested in the previous literature, (ii) how the syntax of emphatic KU is different from anaphoric ku, and (iii) how the prosodic prominence of KU can be accounted for with respect to its syntactic position.