THE DISTRIBUTION OF OPTIONAL AND OBLIGATORY PLURAL MORPHEMES: CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDY OF UZBEK -LAR AND KOREAN - 들

Abstract

Abstract 
This  study  compares  how  Uzbek  and  Korean  express  plurality  through  the 
suffixes -lar and - 들 . Although both languages are agglutinative and share a subject–
object–verb word order, they apply plural marking in different ways. Using 400 noun 
phrases from the Sejong Corpus (Korean) and the Uzbek National Corpus, we examine 
how animacy, definiteness, the presence of numerals, and syntactic position influence 
the use of  these suffixes.  The  results  reveal  a  clear  contrast: Uzbek  -lar is largely 
optional  and  frequently  omitted  when  context  or  a  number  word  already  indicates 
plurality. In contrast, Korean - 들  is strongly restricted to human and animate referents, 
systematically avoided with explicit numerals or classifiers, and preferred in formal 
registers. These findings demonstrate that plural marking in both languages is driven 
by semantic and pragmatic conditions rather than strict grammatical rules. The study 
contributes to cross-linguistic research on nominal number, offers practical insights for 
Uzbek–Korean language teaching, and provides empirically grounded constraints for 
machine translation and natural language processing systems.