Acquisition of Mulitiple Case Marking in Korean

This study investigates the nature of Nominative case in Korean, focusing on multiple Nom constructions, a phenomenon which has been the main source for differing views on Nom case. The study evaluates two opposing syntactic views of Nom case in Korean: default case approach vs structural case approach, by examining the time course of acquisition for relevant constructions using an experimental method. The acquisitional result will provide supporting evidence for the following three arguments. First, Nom case in Korean is not a default case, arguing against Kang (1998), Kuroda (1988, 1992), and Fukui and Takano (1998) among others. Second, the multiple Nom construction is not a property of default case, but an instance of parameter setting of functional head T. Third, the properties of multiple Nom and multiple Acc are not instances of a single parameter. The first noticeable thing about Korean Nom case is that Nom case is morphologically marked, as well as Acc case, as shown in (1).