초나라 문자를 접하면서 진대(秦代) 예서와 비슷한 자형을 발견하고 예서의 시작은 진대(秦代)에서부터가 아니라 그 이전 전국시대 동방문자에서도 나타났던 현상임을 알게 되었고, 그 예를 초국문자 중에서 발견할 수 있다. 그 결과 초간(楚簡)이나, 초박서(楚帛書), 초금문(楚金文)의 자형에서 적지 않은 예변 현상들이 일어났고, 그 현상들은 예변현상(隸變現象)의 초기적 형태임을 알 수 있다. 그리고 이 예변현상은 계속 일어나서 진대(秦代)와서는 예변의 형태가 완정(完整)적인 형태가 되었다. 그래서 이전 학자들은 예서가 진대에서 발생했다고 하지만, 그 발생시기는 진대가 아님이 확연해졌다. 예변현상은 전국시대 당시 동방 각국의 보편적인 현상이었으며, 이것을 “고예(古隸)”라고도 부른다.

In Tchoe (2012, 2013) I have argued that the ECMed DP in Korean is in fact a base-generated proleptic argument. In this subsequent work I will tackle a variety of questions contained in this conclusion. But in the first part of the article, I will delve rather into the Multiple Nominative/Accusative constructions in Korean, which have always been assumed to posses distinct syntactic representations and derivations from the ECM constructions. I will show that the Multiple Nominative/Accusative constructions are also a base-generated proleptic construction. Given this, the unique difference between ECM constructions and Multiple Case constructions in Korean is the fact that in the latter types of constructions the grammatical (thematic/narrow, in other terms) subject/ object is always represented by a DP. Upon this observation, four assertions will be made on the syntax of Korean. The first one is that Korean employs two types of syntactic objects to represent in syntax an argument selected by a predicate; the one is a continuous expression and the other a discontinuous expression in the sense of Hale (1981 et seq). I refer, as a continuous expression, the nominal or propositional expressions that function like a single syntactic object with regard to syntactic operations such as scrambling. For nominal or propositional expressions whose parts split off after the Case-checking, I will refer them as a discontinuous expression. I will also show that discontinuous expressions have nothing to do with so-called symmetrically Merged unstable syntactic objects (Chomsky 2013, Moro 2007 and Ott 2011, forthcoming). But I am not ready to propose any tangible idea on the internal composition of the discontinuous expressions. The second assertion put forward is that discontinuous expressions always consist of a proleptic argument and a grammatical subject/object. The third and last assertions are that proleptic arguments are assigned a pragmatically accessible θ-role and that they appear on the left side of the grammatical subject/object at least in Korean.

This paper is to investigate so-called ECM constructions in Korean. It is generally assumed in the literature that the ECMed DP is a subject of a complement clause raised to the matrix landing site. But I will show that Korean ECMed DP is in fact the base-generated proleptic argument on grounds of evidence related to the long-distance relativization. Besides this conclusion, I will examine one alleged property of the Korean ECM constructions. It is quasi unanimously assumed that there exist restrictions on the category and the grammatical function of the embedded clause and on the embedded predicate such as the transitivity restriction. But we will see that such a restriction has no firm basis. I will also reveal one unknown property of these constructions; not only the subject but also the direct object, the indirect object and even the adjunct can be represented by a proleptic argument, c'est à dire can be ECMed.