Korean Linguistics - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2015

While early studies on the Korean long distance anaphor caki describe it to be subject-oriented in that it can only take subject antecedents, similarly to long distance anaphors in many other languages, more recent studies observe that it can take non-subject antecedents as well, especially in the context of certain verbs. This paper presents a visual-world eye-tracking study that tested whether the antecedent potential of caki in an embedded subject position is a function of the matrix subject, the matrix verb, or both, and whether the subject and the verb effects constrain the interpretation of caki in the same way as null pronouns, a commonly used pronominal form in Korean. These questions were addressed through an investigation of how the subject effect and the verb effect were manifested in processing these pronouns. We found that when caki, but not null pronouns, was first processed, there were more fixations to the images representing the matrix subject than the images representing the matrix object regardless of the matrix verb. We further found that the proportions of fixations to the images in both caki and null trials changed after the processing of some sentential verbs. These findings demonstrate that while null pronoun interpretation is a function of the verb effect only, caki-interpretation is a function of both the subject and the verb effect, supporting a multiple-constraints approach to anaphor resolution.

This article explores the effect of discourse context and prosody on the resolution of wh-scope ambiguity in Tokyo Japanese, Fukuoka Japanese, and South Kyŏngsang Korean. It focuses on wh-islands in particular. There is little consensus in the literature as to whether wh-island effects are present in Japanese or Korean (Huang 1982, Nishigauchi 1990, Lee 1982, Suh 1987, among others). A production study, in which a scope-ambiguous wh-interrogative was preceded by a disambiguating discourse context, demonstrates that speakers’ scope interpretation is consistent with the preceding discourse context. An additional comprehension study reveals that prosodic wh-scope marking observed in the languages studied improves the acceptability of the matrix scope readings in violation of wh-islands. The experimental results support the view that wh-island effects can be overridden by plausible discourse contexts as well as the appropriate prosodic marking of wh-scope. These results highlight the interaction of grammatical knowledge, contextual factors, and prosody.

This paper investigates the role of merger and the typology of v in the syntax of Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) in Korean. Some SVCs with a derivational suffix (e.g. a causative/passive v) in Korean display distinct behavior from the others. We argue that this is due to different syntactic structures among SVCs and that SVCs in Korean must be divided into two sub-types: H(igh)-SVC and L(ow)-SVC. Specifically, we propose that different types of SVCs result from different merger sites of the derivational v head. An H-SVC results when a causative or passive v head is merged to a verb before it is serialized with another verb; an L-SVC results when verbal serialization occurs prior to the merger of the derivational v head. We then turn our attention to a condition on verbal serialization, and propose that verbs can be serialized only when their v heads bear the specific identical property of introducing an external argument. We show that our matching condition coupled with the proposed dichotomy of SVCs has broader empirical coverage than the previous analyses. Theoretically, our study supports the claim that the morphology and the syntax are intertwined so that the attachment site of derivational suffixes may vary in syntax. Our argument also provides novel support for the finer-grained classification of v heads.