Abstract
This thesis aims to investigate the syntactic structures of the nominal phrases with uy in Korean from the perspective of predication in line with den Dikken’s (2006) theory. The Korean genitive marker uy looks like a genitive marker at first blush. However, when we dig into it in respect of syntax, several interesting characteristics emerge, including (i) uy’s omnipotence to connect a modifier to a head noun which has a variety of thematic relations with it; (ii) the flexibility in word order with respect to the other noun-outer prenominal elements; and (iii) the exceptional banning on NP-ellipsis. In addition, a more intriguing phenomenon is that uy may be omitted when the prenominal modifier is θ-marked by the head noun, which is called uy-drop in An (2009). By comparing the syntactic characteristics between the uy-marked and the uy-unmarked nominal phrases, I propose that the two originate from completely distinct constructions: uy-marked nominal phrases are derived from a small clause by virtue of Predicate Inversion with the aid of a linker; in contrast, uy-unmarked nominal phrases are base-generated within the NP projection. The structural disparity thus leads to the divergences of syntactic behaviors between the two. Furthermore, the Japanese data serves as the cross-linguistic evidence for the bifurcate analysis, in parallel with the Korean data.