A CENTERING APPROACH TO THE (CASE) (TOPIC) RESTRICTION IN KOREAN

If nominative and accusative markers in Korean are taken to be postpositions, as they should be, then the failure for them to occur before a delimiter is not expected. I argue that this restriction against the combination ‘POSTPOSITION-DELIMITER’, of which the ‘CASE-TOPIC combination is given most attention, is not to be treated as a syntactic matter (pace Ahn 1988; Kuh 1988, among others) or a phonological matter (pace Kang 1986). The discourse-organizational properties of the nominative postposition ka/i are shown explicitly to be incompatible with those of the ‘topic’ delimiter nun/un; while a noun phrase with the former does not realize the \primary center’, in the sense of Grosz et al. (1983), of the preceding utterance, one with the latter does realize it and further retains it as the primary center of the current utterance; while a noun phrase followed by ka/i cannot realize the primary forward-looking center of the current utterance, one followed by nun/un typically does. © 1991, Walter de Gruyter. All rights reserved.