Bound Noun swu in Korean: A Reply to Park (2022)

This paper discusses Park‘s (2022) criticism of Kim (2014) and her own proposal with the modal construction of a bound noun swu. Park (2022) points out that Kim (2014) has a problem with a past tense morpheme -ess. However, the -ess suffix is not a true past tense marker in the bound noun swu construction, and so does not pose a challenge for Kim (2014). Park (2022) proposes that swu and iss merge in Mod as one unit, but her approach has some non-trivial problems: there is no position reserved for adnominal T; grammatical/pragmatic markers can surface between swu and iss, which sugguests swu and iss do not form one unit; some part of the swu iss unit can be deleted, which violates the standard assumption that ellpisis targets a constituent. In addition to these problems, Kim (2014) has more explanatory power than Park (2022) in terms of grammaticalization.