Japanese/Korean Linguistics

The Korean plural marker tul is often described as optional, but its distribution is sensitive to definiteness and humanness. Accounts differ on how these factors interact: some argue that definiteness makes tul obligatory regardless of humanness (Kang 1994; Kim 2005), while others report that non-human definites with plural reference do not always require tul (Park 2020; Choi, Yoon, & Dayal 2026). To investigate these factors, we conducted an elicited production task and a sentence pair judgment task with native Korean speakers. In production, speakers used tul more frequently with [+Human] than [-Human] nouns in definite plural contexts. In judgment, tul-marked nouns were preferred over unmarked nouns for plural referents, particularly in definite contexts, with this preference further modulated by humanness. These findings suggest that definiteness and humanness jointly influence tul-marking in a gradient rather than categorical manner, supporting an analysis of tul as a plural modifier (Kim & Melchin 2018).