Sunyoung Lee. 2017. Online Processing of Dependency between an NPI and Negation in Korean. Studies in Modern Grammar 95, 19-36. The present study investigated online processing of syntactic dependency between a negative polarity item (NPI) and its negative licensor in Korean. A total of 32 adult native speakers of Korean participated in the study. The study employed a region-by-region, self-paced reading paradigm to measure online reading times. The results showed that as soon as a parser encountered an NPI in the sentence, it expected a negative element to come up at the earliest potential position. Slow reading times occurred at the first candidate site if such an expectation was not satisfied immediately. The findings of the study support the Filled Gap Effect in English (Fodor 1978; Crain and Fodor 1985; Stowe 1986; Frazier and Clifton 1989) and the Typing Mismatch Effect in Japanese (Miyamoto and Takahashi 2001, 2002); Aoshima et al. 2004; Ueno and Kluender 2010). The results suggest that the human parsers, despite the different structural properties of each language, use the similar sentence processing mechanism.

Pil-Hwan Lee. 2003. A Historical Study on English Negative Expressions - with Special Reference to the Methodology in English Historical Syntax. Studies in Modern Grammar 31, 107-136. This is a study on the changes in sentential negation in English, from Old English to the present day, in terms of Jespersen`s(1917) Negative Cycle. The Negative Cycle is an assumption that negative adverbs are depleted lexical meaning they undergo phonological and morphosyntactic reduction to a bound morpheme prefixed to the finite verb. The history of English clearly supports this assumption. The issue is how to explain these aspects of changes. van Kemenade(1997a, 1997c, 1999, 2000) tries to account for the history of English sentential negation as a pure case of morphosyntactic change. It means that the change was triggered by structural factors. However, it is argued in this paper that the triggering factor for the change is the weakening of meaning. In other words, negative adverbs are morphologically and syntactically weakened to negative head status due to the semantic bleaching of negation and to the overlapping function in expressing sentential negation in NegP. The two positions in NegP inherently presuppose the functional redundancy in expressing sentential negation, so the specifier of NegP is generally weakened to Neg˚.