Abstract
Drawing on the fact that the light verb ha- ‘do’ in Korean may or may not be elided in negative sentences, I offer a syntactic analysis for the light verb ellipsis in which the various types of light verbs belong to distinct heads, such as v, Appl, and Voice. Hierarchically, they occupy different syntactic positions. Thus, the light verb ellipsis ascribes itself to a syntactic hierarchy. The ellipsis behavior of various types of the light verb distinguishes them in a way that implicates structure, not other factors, such as semantics. The syntactic analysis put forth here constitutes substantive evidence supporting the configurational theory of argument structures in which different theta roles can be mapped into various syntactic positions.