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Subject marker: -이/가
2 years agoSubject marker: -이/가
As mentioned in Lesson 1, Korean is an agglutinating language. It means that Korean
uses little grammatical devices attached to words to specify their roles in a sentence.
English is not an agglutinating language, employing rather a fixed word order and
prepositions in order to specify the role of each part.
A subject of a sentence is the agent (doer) of the action described by the sentence.
Assuming that a state of being can also be treated as an action, a subject can take any
kind of predicate, i.e., a verbal, an adjectival, or a nominal predicate. Think of "S goes,"
"S is bad," and "S is a man." In each case, S is the subject. To mark this subject,
Korean attaches either 이 or 가 to it. -이 is used when the subject word ends with a
final consonant (patch'im), whereas -가 is for those ending without a final consonant.
Only nouns can be subjects in Korean, such is the case in English. In other words, when you see a part of a sentence attached with -이 or -가, you will know that it must be a noun. However, you might hear sometimes people say sentences without using subject markers - 이 / 가 for subjects. It is because the sentences are simple and a
conversational reality is presumed. For these sentences, subject markers can be
replaced by a short pause. In sentences the structure of which is complex, or in written
forms, the markers should be specified.
Now, let's look at some examples.
subject predicate
이 바지 가 편안해요. These pants are comfortable.
기차 가 와요. The train is coming.
선생님 이 웃으세요. The teacher is laughing.
저것 이 학교이에요. That (over there) is a school.
이것 이 곰이에요. This is a bear.
