This study examined how adult native speakers of Korean prosodically structure their speech during spontaneous story telling. It asked participants to produce a spontaneous story from a picture book in L1 Korean. Participants’ phonological phrasing (via pause) was analyzed with reference to eight hierarchical syntactic structures defined in the study. The results suggested three-level hierarchy in phonological structure in spoken Korean: between sentences > between independent clauses > between a dependent clause and the matrix clause = any within-clause boundaries. Korean speakers paused the longest prior to starting a new sentence. They paused statistically significantly shorter between two independent clauses (e.g., coordinate clauses and adverbial clauses), and even shorter between a dependent clause (e.g., complement clauses and relative clauses) and the matrix clause. Interestingly, however, the last type of clausal boundaries, i.e., between interdependent but separate clauses, did not differ from any of the observed within-clause boundaries with respect to intonation structure marked by pauses. These results are consistent with the literature as to across-clause boundaries, but contra the traditional prediction that syntactic hierarchical structure may be mapped onto phonological structure: clausal boundaries are prosodically treated the same as within-clausal boundaries. Crosslinguistic and educational implications are discussed.

Morphosyntactic and prosodic information is accessed by native speakers of North Gyeongsang Korean when interrogatives are interpreted. The present study investigates the interface between these structures. To do so, the study analyzes the syntactic and prosodic structures of the dialect’s yes/no and wh-questions, and then examines the rate of comprehension and acceptance of the two types of the interrogatives in a perception test. The prosodic structures in the test are modified by transplantation, the results of which allow us to find out the following. First, presented with the interrogatives whose syntactic and prosodic structures did not match, the native subjects of Gyeongsang Korean relied more on the prosodic structures than on the syntactic ones. Second, changes in prosodic structures had a strong influence on simple sentences, but relatively less so on complex sentences. These results lead to the conclusion that prosodic structures are the decisive factor in syntactic interpretations, and, accordingly, are intricately intertwined with the syntactic structures during the processing of interrogatives.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the syntactic structure of the so-called transparent relative clause. What in the standard free relative clause has been treated as a unit including a head NP and a relative pronoun together. In the case of transparent free relatives, however, a what-clause reveals some peculiar characteristics different from standard relative clauses. To explain those characteristics, many linguists have suggested several different analyses. The analyses can be categorized into three groups: Backward Deletion, Shared Structure analysis, (Rightward) Movement and Deletion analysis. Because of their drawbacks, I have suggested Leftward Movement and Deletion analysis, and adopted Winkler's(2005) D(rivational)-Model of Grammar to explain the interactions between the PF deletion and LF interpretation.

The purpose of this paper is to confirm that the syntactic structures of morphological causative constructions should be derived by considering the properties of the verb bases such as the transitive verb bases and the intransitive verb bases according to Son (2006). This means that the causee in the constructions may be an agent, depending on the verb base types mentioned above. On the contrary, it is claimed that the causee in the constructions cannot be an agent in Kim (2010) and Park (2012a, b) because the causee cannot be compatible with an agent-oriented adverb like 'ilpule' (on purpose). In this paper, I give some pieces of evidence for Son’s (2006) argument and further show that the causee could be matched with an adverb like 'hayekum' (make) which has the function that makes the noun just before it become the agent of the caused event in the causative constructions. Finally, it is proposed that the syntactic structures of morphological causative constructions should be subdivided on the basis of the context as well as the verb base types.