Existential Locatives and Possessives in Japanese and Korean

Japanese and Korean use an existential predicate not only to express existence but also to convey possession and location (Lee 2008, Park 2009, Kim 2016, Tomioka 2007, Kishimoto 2016, among others). Korean uses the predicate iss- ‘be’, and Japanese uses aru/iru ‘be’. The fact that these patterns often coincide crosslinguistically has prompted earlier studies to propose a unified analysis for both constructions (e.g. Freeze 1992). Upon closer examination, however, it becomes clear that the two constructions do not exhibit the same patterns. In this paper, I propose an analysis that encompasses Japanese and Korean, arguing that locative and possessive constructions have distinct argument structures based on their distinct syntactic behaviors. The present study aims to provide a more systematic explanation of the complexities and differences inherent in each construction.