ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines what is dealt with in the book. The book provides a comprehensive analysis of various types of dependent elements or particles in Korean, which is an agglutinative language. Although some particles are affixes, many of them are clitics contrary to general expectations. Additionally, many expressions assumed to be words are actually phrases. These new observations lead to a correct identification of basic units of syntax (i.e., words) and hence to a proper analysis of sentences. The morphosyntactic status of particles is evaluated theory-neutrally: only on the basis of their formal and distributional properties. The book is divided into two main parts: Chapters 2–4 and Chapters 5–6. The former observes Korean particles and provides a comprehensive analysis of them, on the basis of their morphosyntactic status. The latter examines some constructions in which clitics play an important role in characterizing the constructions involved, focusing on those containing clausal connectives.
