Genitive Case in Korean and its implications for noun phrase structure

I discuss in this paper the behavior of the so-called genitive Case marker uy in Korean and argue that its occurrence has nothing to do with Case licensing in terms of GB and Minimalism. To this end, I examine the distribution of uy and show that it is obligatorily realized on certain elements which do not require Case at all. I also show that uy is in an allomorphic relation with a type of prenominal inflection which clearly has nothing to do with Case. This means that, strictly speaking, it is not correct to refer to uy as a Case marker. Based on the analysis of the distribution of uy, I also explore the ordering possibilities of certain prenominal elements in Korean in light of Greenberg's Universal 20 and show that the current analysis provides a principled account of their behavior. The discussion also has implications for noun phrase structure in the language, which has not received much attention in the literature until recently.