Table of Contents

Preface List of Abbreviations and Notations Glossary 0. Introduction Korean and its speakers 1. Writing system 2.1. History 2.2. Inventory 2.3. Romanization 2. Pronunciation 2.1. The Syllable 2.2. Consonants 2.3. Vowels 2.4. Intonation 3. Sentence 3.1. The elements of a simple sentence 3.1.1. Subject 3.1.2. Object 3.1.2. Predicate 3.2. Sentence patterns 3.3. Basic word order 4. Words 4.1. Types of vocabulary 4.2. Expanding words 5. Verbs 5.1. Action verbs 5.2. Descriptive verbs 5.3. Two kinds of ‘be’ 5.4. Making new verbs 5.5. Marking time and aspect 5.6. Honorification 5.6.1. Subject honorification 5.6.2. Addressee honorification 5.6.3. Reference honorification 5.7. Causatives and passives 6. Nouns, pronouns, classifiers, noun phrases 6.1. Proper and common nouns 6.2. Pronouns 6.3. Numerals and numeral classifiers 6.3. Making new nouns 6.4. Making noun phrases 6.5. Noun compounds 6.6. Word order in noun phrases 6.7. Case marking 7. Modifiers 7.1 Adverbs 7.2 Noun modifiers 7.3 Deictics 8. Mimetic words 8.1. Reduplication 8.2. Vowel 9. Negation 9.1. Short-form 9.2. Long-form 10. Expanded sentences 10.1. Compound sentences 10.2. Complex sentences 11. Casual speech 12. Linguistic protocol 12.1. Choosing the appropriate speech form 12.2. Honorific readjustments and politeness strategies 12.3. Language, ideology, and society Glossary of terms with explanations List of particles, suffixes, and sentential endings Further reading

About the Author

Young-Key Kim-Renaud is Professor of Korean Language and Culture and International Affairs, and Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the George Washington University in DC.

Reviews

"I think the book serves considerably more than a pedagogical function, and will be a valued descriptive and data resource for anyone who is curious about how this language is organized. It also will be a source of inspiration for graduate students in linguistics, who increasingly are pursuing projects on the structural aspects of Korean... I think this is a fine, careful contribution to the scholarship on Korean, from both linguistic and pedagogical perspectives, and I expect it to rank among the most influential, most accessible English-language expositions on Korean."- Gregory K. Iverson, University of Maryland; The Journal of Asian Studies; Volume 69/3, August 2010

'I am writing to thank you for "Korean - An Essential Grammar", Routledge, 2009. I had the great fortune to discover it two weeks ago and even at first glance it was clear I had found a small treasure. Since then I have been using every spare moment to fly through it, as though it were a thriller novel. Because it has been thrilling. The clarity and precision of your writing combined with skillful treatment of meanings, historical perspectives, and sufficient examples (thanks for the English-grammar instruction too!) have made this book into a 'page-turner' for me - right through to the last word.
I am not a linguist, nor likely ever to be one. But if anything can bring home the excitement of understanding the structure of a language, it is this beautiful primer of yours. It will remain in close reach as a reference.'- Don Lacy, Customer