A comparative analysis of German infinitive constructions and their syntactic and semantic equivalents in Korean

This article is a contrastive study of German infinitive constructions and their syntactic and semantic equivalents in Korean. Grammatical restriction s are examined, for instance case marking and semantic relations between th e governing verbs and the verb phrases dependent of them(subject implicatio n, diathesis, modality and temporal relations). The functional and illocuti ve differences between the two languages in the use of such construction ar e analysed. These result from differences in a number of aspects: word orde r (prepositional vs. postpositional), syntactic connections (particle/conju nction vs. incomplete noun), the expression of semantic relationships-for i nstance voice (periphrastic verb phrase vs. inflectional morpheme) or modal ity (modal verb vs. inflectional morpheme/incomplete noun)-an syntactic mar king (implication vs. explication).