Mixed Categories and Argument Transfer in the Korean Light Verb Construction

As suggested by Grimshaw and Mester (1988) for the analysis of the corresponding Japanese verb suru, ha-ta ‘do’ is ‘light’ in that it is partially or completely devoid of its own θ-marking capacities. In (1a), the arguments John and Tom are semantically selected, not by ha-ta but by the Sino-Korean noun (hereafter the MAIN PREDICATE) tayhwa ‘talk’, and similarly in (1b) the arguments John and yenge ‘English’ are selected by the main predicate kongpu ‘study’. This can be verified by the fact that the identical arguments appear in the corresponding noun phrases without ha-ta as given in (2).