I propose that the dative and locative case particles are not postpositions but morphological case markers, quite in contrast to the common view in the literature (Yang 1972, Cho and Sells 1995, and Suh 2013 among many others). I will show the difference between the nominative and the accusative and the dative and the locative in case drop, case stacking, and case spreading is attributed to the fact that the dative case and the locative case are inherent case, as compared with the nominative and the accusative, which are structural case par excellence. The present proposal has a nontrivial implication regarding the other case particles typically argued as postpositions in Korean.

The goal of this study is to examine case markers in Korean, i.e., i/ka and (l)ul, from a communicative perspective. In particular, this study seeks to explain what communicative functions the case markers hold in actual conversation. Based on the empirical analysis of the data, this study claims that the case markers in Korean are not only used for encoding the syntactic case of a given argument but they are also used as a linguistic cue to help focus the listener's attention on the processing difficulty and the informational importance that the given argument denotes. It further argues that speakers of Korean strategically use the case markers as a means of facilitating successful communication with the listener.