Capturing the Korean Facts

In this chapter, I examine how the decompositional split-DP analysis presented in Chap. 4 fares with Korean, a language whose N modifiers have not been much studied in a formal framework. Our examination shows that the proposed analysis captures several important aspects of N modification phenomena in Korean, yet it falls short of capturing certain adjective ordering restrictions (AORs) attested by the language. To resolve these issues, I propose an output-based filtering device within an optimality theoretic framework and show how doing so yields results that adopting a derivational approach alone cannot. In this context, I answer two outstanding questions raised in Chap. 3, namely, what governs the ordering of RCs inside the same nominal in Korean and why in Korean, occurring immediately after the distal demonstrative (DEM) ku may allow an N modifier to occur preceding a more complex N modifier in apparent violation of weight-based AORs.