by Kihwang Lee

Korean is an agglutinative language which has a rich morphological system. In languages like Korean, suffixing grammatical elements are rigorously used for marking various linguistic features such as grammatical case, number, person, etc. Particles ('Josa' in Korean) belong to a group of such grammatical elements which attach to nouns to mark grammatical cases of the preceding nouns and other semantic/pragmatic information. There are several hundreds of particles in Korean (including complex particles).

Some particles are variants of each other: they share a same function and a same grammatical/lexical meaning. The selection of a particular variant is largely dependent on the phonological characteristics of the preceding noun. It is similar to the variation of plural suffixes '-es', '-s' in English. In other words, if you change one of the noun in your text when you are revising the text, you often need to change the particle as well.

Now consider the cross-referencing in LaTeX and the above matter. The labeling of the referent is automatically done in LaTeX (e.g., Figure 1, Figure 2...). Consequently, the particle which is attached to the label needs to be changed according to the phonological condition of the automatically generated label. To eliminate the tedious manual editing process, Korean LaTeX systems implemented automatic particle selection mechanisms.

• 김강수, 한글 라텍에서 조사 이형태 교체의 자동화에 관하여 AJT, Volumn 1, Number 2.
  
  

CategoryGlossary