A Study on the Category of Directional Prefix in Korean: Focused on Syntactic Properties

In this paper, we discuss the category of prefixes in Korean, based on their syntactic properties from particles. In previous studies, Korean prefixes have been defined and classified mainly by their morphological and semantic properties. We introduced the syntactic properties, referring to the studies on “particles” which have been known as a middle category between words and affixes. Here are our findings. First, some directional prefixes in Korean such as nay- and tuli-1 affect the argument structure of the entire sentence, while others do not. Second, Korean directional prefixes such as toy- and tot- have the characteristic of reverse result headness, similar to directional particles of Germanic languages and Mandarin Chinese. Third, directional prefixes can be categorized in the order of “toy- > kkal-/nay- > tuli-1/chi- > mac- >nayli-”, considering their semantic, morphological and syntactic properties altogether. In our research, toy- is the most typical among Korean prefixes. In summary, directional prefixes in Korean can be defined more precisely by reverse result headness and argument-structural effect as syntactic factors.