Bound Noun pep in Korean

This paper discusses the syntactic analysis of a bound noun pep in Korean. Song and Kim (2014) categorize four different meanings of pep – ‘law’, ‘way/how.to’, ‘conjecture/speculation’ and ‘naturalness’. They assume that the latter two meanings form a “bound-noun-complex” with the following restricted verbs (e.g., a copular verb i and a light verb ha). However, the seemingly morphological and syntactic characteristics of the target structures are not due to the bound noun pep but due to the following verbs (the copular and the light verb). Also, the restrictions are not limited to the bound noun pep. In this paper, I argue that there are three different structures with the bound noun pep based on its different meanings: i) it merges in N like normal nouns; ii) it also merges in N, subsequently moves to small n, and ultimately moves to ModEPIS; iii) it can be a head of C. Given that grammaticalization tends to go upward in a syntactic tree (Roberts and Roussou 2003, van Gelderen 2004), the proposal leads us to conclude that the bound noun pep is highly grammaticalized compared to other bound nouns.