ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the aspects of Korean grammar relevant to acquisition at various points. It also explains the morphological identity of the prenominai adjectival ending and the relative clause predicate ending as well as the semantic similarity between the two constructions. The chapter considers relevance to current theoretical discussions in research on language acquisition and linguistic theory. This chapter shows how an elaborate syntactic analysis of a particular aspect of adult grammar enable the authors to go beyond a descriptive level and to achieve a better understanding of the crucial differences between childrens and adults grammars. Korean-speaking children show precocity in producing both predicate inflections and nominal particles. Korean grammar also features non-subject honorification, which replaces the predicate with a suppletive form if the referent of a non-subject is higher in the social hierarchy than that of the subject. Cross linguistic data suggest that very young children show sensitivity to actual frequencies of subject drop in their target language.
