Korean grammar

Korean grammar
Hangul	9품사
Hanja	9品詞
Revised Romanization	gupumsa
McCune–Reischauer	kup'umsa

This article is a description of the morphology, syntax, and semantics of Korean. For phonetics and phonology, see Korean phonology. See also Korean honorifics, which play a large role in the grammar.

This article uses a form of Yale romanization to illustrate the morphology of Korean words. The Yale system is different from the Revised Romanization of Korean seen with place names.

Under the version of Yale used here, morphemes are written according to their underlying form rather than their spelling in the Korean writing system or pronunciation. Under this system, for example, the syllable which is written in Korean as 었 is analyzed as ess even though the ss would be pronounced t before another consonant, and the vowel e ㅓ is pronounced low and somewhat rounded, closer to o. To avoid confusion, bold type will represent the morphology (in Yale), and italics will represent Revised Romanization.

Korean grammarians have been classifying Korean words to parts of speech for centuries, but the modern standard is the one taught in public schools, chosen by South Korea's 1963 Committee on Education. This is the 9 pumsa (9품사) system, which divides words into nine categories called pumsa.

The pumsa are themselves grouped together according to the following chart.

Both cardinal and ordinal numbers are grouped into their own part of speech. Descriptive verbs and action verbs are classified separately despite sharing essentially the same conjugation. Verb endings constitute a large and rich class of morphemes, indicating such things in a sentence as tense, mood, aspect, speech level (of which there are 7 in Korean), and honorifics. Prefixes and suffixes are numerous, partly because Korean is an agglutinative language.

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