The Journal of Studies in Language ISSN:1225-4770(Print) 2671-6151(Online) 언어연구

The paper taps into conservative vs. non-conservative readings of Korean numeral classifiers recently investigated in Ahn and Sauerland (2017) and Ahn and Ko (2022). We start with deriving a research issue from Shin’s (2017) proposal that postnominal and floating numeral classifiers are counterparts of English partitives and the latter is subject to the definiteness condition. We then review Ahn and Ko’s (2022) experimental study of floating numeral proportional classifiers, which reports that definite-marked host nouns/NPs result in giving rise to a conservative reading only. However, non-definite-marked ones can produce a non-conservative reading more markedly than a conservative one. However, Ahn and Ko have a problem in constructing “indefinite” experimental conditions. To resolve this problem, we use our intuitive sense of grammaticality to examine the meanings of sentences containing numeral proportional and ordinary/sortal classifiers in different contexts. They can be interpreted in different ways depending on the context. The contexts relevant to the issue under examination are: whether host nouns/NPs are Case-marked or not, whether or not they refer to specific sets of entities, and whether the ‘-nun’ particle on them is used as a topic marker or contrastive focus marker.