Traditionally, the morpheme uy ‘of’ has been treated as a genitive case marker in Korean linguistics. It is thus natural in Korean linguistics that syntactic objects combined with uy are taken to be assigned genitive case. However, some generative grammarians including An (2012) and Hong (2013) have recently defied such tradition by claiming that uy is not a genitive marker but is a prenominal inflection in an allomorphic relation with the so-called adnominal ending (u)n, or by suggesting that those phrases marked with uy are adjuncts rather than specifiers or complements. This study critically examines their claims and analyses, and tries to find out their problems. In doing this, it makes efforts to support the traditional view from which uy is a genitive case marker.

This paper identifies two types of 'uy', which has been called an adnominal particle in Korean, and presents a syntactic analysis of them. The particle 'uy' can be divided into two types; genitive marker 'uy' and modificational marker 'uy'. The former, realized as structural Case, attaches to an argument noun phrase of referential semantic type. In contrast, the latter has a function of attributive modification, whereby combined with a non-argument noun phrase of property semantic type. Genitive marker 'uy' is licensed at the Spec of DP position, whereas modificational marker 'uy' occupies an NP-adjunction position. This paper also discusses so-called compound nouns, in which 'uy' is not allowed to intervene. Those constructions are shown to have properties as syntactic products and to have type interpretations of head nouns.

This paper aims to explore Korean genitive noun phrases ``N1의 N2`` that are also translated in French as genitive noun phrases ``N2 de N1``. My discussion centers on describing two things: (a) What are linguistic factors by which N1 and N2 in Korean not accompanying any article are respectively preceded by one of the two articles: the indefinite article and the definite article. (b) What are linguistic environments by which N1 and N2 in Korean can be respectively translated in French as one of the four noun phrases: generic noun phrases, specific noun phrases, non-specific noun phrases and predicative noun phrases.