Definiteness of Korean: A Contrastive study of Korean and Italian

The present contribution aims to deepen the contrastive studies between Korean and Italian regarding the concept of definiteness. The definiteness is one of the features of noun phrases, distinguishing between definite noun phrases and indefinite noun phrases . My research will primarily concern the question of determining the functional structures of NP as arguments and examine them through syntactic, semantic and pragmatic comparisons with Italian. The work will suggest the possible equivalents in Korean for each use of Italian articles to determine how the definiteness in Korean can be expressed without the article system and might be applied in Korean acquisition for Italian speakers helping them understand and overcome certain differences between two languages. Indeed my work will examine the extensive usage of null argument in Korean and the exact role of the case markers for the topic and the subject, which can easily be omitted and elicited from the discourse, thus contributing to the opacity of definiteness in the Korean language.