This paper claims that feature percolation mechanism has both conceptual and empirical problems. On the conceptual and theoretical side, the assumption that features percolate only from Spec positions turn out to be problematic in explaining pied-piping wh-movement of English in the least. On the empirical side, it is shown that feature percolation faces problems with various cross linguistic findings from both theoretical and experimental studies regarding pied-piping, sluicing with preposition stranding and subject-verb agreement mismatch in English. As an alternative approach to those phenomena, this paper proposes that multiple activation which causes confusion on the part of speakers/ comprehenders would be a key factor in explaining the data that has been dealt with under feature percolation.
There have been three main proposals regarding to the structure of the English existential construction: small clause, bare-NP, and ternary analysis. Each has some merits in accounting for its syntactic properties, but at the same time leaves out certain empirical issues unaccounted for. This paper critically reviews these three previous analyses and offers a hybrid analysis that allows both the bare NP as well as small clause structure for the construction. We sketch this hybrid analysis within a Construction Grammar perspective.
This paper examines the identity of null objects in Korean. For the last two decades, null objects in this language have been argued to derive from either base-generation as an empty pronoun or ellipsis/deletion. To resolve this controversial issue, we scrutinize some previous arguments supporting one analysis or the other for null objects. We set forth a background for the discussion of them, starting with the diagnostic that Chung et al. (2011) uses to distinguish VP and TP ellipsis in English. We then turn to Hoji's (1998) and Ahn and Cho's (2011) test utilizing the availability of a sloppy-like reading, and then to Hoji's (2003) and Bae and Kim's (2012) probe employing R-expressions. Showing that all these diagnostics are not effective as much as they have been claimed to be, we use the new test capitalizing on the extraction out of an ellipsis site, arguing that null objects in Korean derive from deletion/ellipsis rather than base-generation as pro.
Despite a variety of accounts proposed to capture the grammatical properties that the so-called dummy plural maker (DPM) -tul in Korean displays, it has been commonly taken for granted that a DPMed phrase is to be c-commanded by its associate plural element (APE). This paper observes, however, that the APE itself can host DPM -tul. This fact calls for a novel licensing mechanism, as any account that resorts to a direct c-command relation between a DPMed phrase and its APE will fail. This paper proposes that there is a functional category that Agrees with the APE. This is plausible because the semantic interpretation of the DPM construction has more to do with a semantically plural element, i.e., the APE, rather than a DPMed category. Then DPM -tul on the APE can be naturally considered as a phonological realization of the Agree relation. DPM -tul on a non-APE element is viewed merely as a copy due to an operation called Spread, much like the distribution of negative morphemes in negative concord languages, except for the optionality of the phonological realization.
Pseudogapping is treated as a combination of movement and ellipsis by many researchers. After reviewing some arguments based on movement analysis, I argue for a merge-based approach with the assumptions of Multiple Sphere Hypothesis (Im 2004-2012). The remnants in VP are not moved and elided but merged in Ω-sphere evading the PF deletion rule posited with the notion of E-GIVENness (Merchant 2001).
Korean has so-called after-thought or right dislocation constructions. But wh-words can not be the target of the construction. This paper proposes that the ban on wh-after-thought arises from PF side, especially sentence final intonation. If wh-words are after-thoughted, the sentence final ending C require y/n-question sentence final intonation but the Ω head which is onto C projection and hosts after-thoughted wh-words requires wh-question sentence final intonation. So, the sentence final intonation (= C intonation + Ω intonation) has paradoxical information and the expression crashes at PF. This proposal naturally can be extended to describe the grammatical variation which says that some speakers accept wh-after-thought as grammatical when some, but not all, wh-words are after-thoughted in multiple wh-constructions. The main point is that there is some variation on whether all wh-words must match with sentence final intonation or not.
This paper argues for an operation in Korean, called N'-Ellipsis, also known as NP-Ellipsis (henceforth, NPE) under the DP structure, found in possessive constructions. Since An (2012) argues for a different analysis, namely, a pro analysis, instead of the NPE analysis, this paper mostly takes a careful examination of his arguments and contends that the pro analysis is not viable in favor of the NPE analysis. I show that An's claim that the NPE construction is derived from the multiple Case-marking construction is in fact way too weak. I further argue that the contrasts arising from the construction in question are closely related to the possibility of possessor raising and thereby ill-formed cases of NPE can be attributed to the widely assumed convention that bar-level category is blind to syntactic operations.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature of null arguments in Korean. Even though many studies have been done to identify the null arguments, there seem to be some problems yet to be resolved in identifying them. The pro analysis of Ahn & Cho (2010, 2011a, 2011b, 2012) is likely to have wider explanative power than the DP ellipsis analysis because of the extensive uses of pro in Korean. Nevertheless, it is argued in this paper that the DP ellipsis analysis may be still applicable to constructions in which null arguments related to reflexives are missing.