The Absence of the Adjective Category in Korean

This paper argues that Korean lacks a distinct, open category of Adjective; what have been traditionally analyzed as adjectives are a kind of stative verbs. I propose that apparent noun-modifying adjectives in Korean are predicates inside relative clauses. The proposed analysis makes several predictions about the syntax and semantics of noun modifiers in Korean. In particular, it predicts that putative adnominal adjectives will only have intersective meanings, because they are predicates inside relative clauses, which are standardly interpreted intersectively wih respect to their head nouns. Confronted with the challenge that Korean abounds in non-intersective, subsective predicates like nungswukha‘skillful’, I propose new lexical entries for them and thereby overcome this challenge.