The pragmatics and syntax of pragmatic morphemes in Korean

This thesis has two goals, describing the uses of some selected Pragmatic Morphemes (PMs) in Korean and giving an account of their syntactic behaviors in the GPSG framework. First, according to the Cooperative Principle, I describe how the speaker uses a PM and how the hearer understands it. I claim that a PM has one sense and its various uses are inferred from that sense according to the Gricean CP. When the speaker uses a PM in his utterance, he assumes the hearer believes he has goals, and he expects her to be able to figure out its uses which are relevant to his goals in a way indicated by its sense because he believes she assumes he does not use it without any purpose. The hearer believes that the speaker used that PM in support of his goals, and can infer from its sense how it is relevant to his goal at the moment.I deal with four PMs out of many in Korean. The PM com 'a little' is used to show the speaker's politeness to the hearer by implicating that he is minimizing the threat to her face, or to insult her by belittling her ability. The speaker uses the PM tul (plural marker) to indicate that an event he is describing occurred more than once, or that each referent of a subject of his utterance is involved in an event. The PMs puthe 'from' and kkaci 'to' are used to show that the speaker never expected an event/situation he is describing to occur.Second, the morpho-syntactic behavior of PMs are analyzed within the GKPS (1985) version of GPSG. A new type of 'Near-HEAD' features is proposed for PMs, following the GPSG multi-headed approach to coordination. Near-head features are instantiated along head nodes like standard HEAD features in GKPS (1985), but they must observe an additional restriction that a node with them comes last in a local tree. The near-HEAD feature analysis predicts correctly that PMs are located on the lexical head of a phrase and that they appear on the final conjunct in coordination. However, I suggest that PMs can be treated through HEAD features, if we give up the GPSG claim that coordination is multi-headed.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio