What does Germanic Syntactic Change Tell Us about Korean?

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between diachronic syntacticchange and the prominence typology of subject and topic in Korean and Germanic Languages (German, Dutch and English). The focus of this paper is to show how the degree of semantic bleaching in transitivity in a given language is correlated with the grammaticization of syntactic rules and the lexicalization processes with respect to the typology of subject and topic. At the left extreme side of our system we find an English type language whose properties such as less intense semantic relations of predicate and arguments and the greater productivity in the grammaticizing rules (e.g. raising and passivization) are not accidentally related to the greater opacity specific to the system. At the opposite end of our system we find a topic-prominent language like Korean in which a transparency principle motivates a more direct reflection of semantic roles in the morphology. Thus, the English subject is analyzed as a grammaticalized topic, whereas Korean retains as a typical SOV language an independent topic category in addition to the notion of subject. Prima facie evidence for the topic prominence parameter is presented via a historical account involving Germanic Languages where the verb-finality is almost entirely abolished except for German and Dutch.