Rather like English examples such as It is that he is a genius, Korean also has what has been called an "inferential cleft construction". This paper looks at the motivations of why speakers would introduce such a construction instead of using a simple declarative sentence, at what kind of semantic and pragmatic relations are evoked in the construction, and at grammatical properties of the construction of interest. In particular, the paper shows that unlike the English counterpart, the Korean inferential construction has no expletive pronoun, and conveys much wider inferential relationships such as explanation, reason, cause, consequence, and even paraphrase. This wide array of uses allows the construction to be used to facilitate cohesion in a variety of contexts.

Research in theoretical linguistics is often driven by a goal of a reduction of theoretical postulates and the simplification of the overall system. Apparently disparate accounts of disparate phenomena may be shown to all full under one meta-principle, or the effects of some mechanism may be shown to follow from other independent components of the grammar. Specifically, I will only be concerned here with the part of X`-theory that distinguishes words from phrases-considering in what ways the syntax needs to make reference to the notions of minimal and maximal projection. We will see that non-saturated elements can be selected as X^0s, and that saturated elements may have special distribution of X^0, not XP. Adverbs, particles and pronouns lack valence or selectional properties, yet need not, and in some cases must not, behave as phrases. Consequently, the attempt to reduce phrasality to saturatedness seems misguided.