On the wordhood of Josa of Korean in a typological perspective

The purpose of this paper is to measure the wordhood of Korean Josa based on the typological research established in Choi(2021, 2022). As noted, there have been some views that consider Korean Josa as ‘syntactic affixes’ or ‘clitics’. What they have in common is that Korean Josa have phonological dependencies, but syntactically function as words. In this paper, I examined 44 Korean Josa on a 5-point scale according to the criteria for distinguishing between affixes and words proposed by Choi(2022), and found that the average score was 3.78, indicating a high degree of wordhood. The highest score is 4.18 and the lowest score is 3.45, so it is very important to note that none of them appears to be closer to affixes than words. Focusing on each Josa, using the school grammar system's classification of Josa, I could see that the average score is higher for ‘case marking’ than for ‘conjunctive’ or ‘adding special meaning’, but the difference is very small and negligible. In terms of criteria, I categorized them into semantic, syntactic, morphological, and phonological ones, and the scores decreased in this order. Only in the phonological criteria, affixhood scores are higher than wordhood score, which are due to the dependent nature of Korean Josa. The above results are sufficient to empirically prove that Korean Josa can be considered as words in a typological perspective.