On August 22, Eunsun Jou successful defended her extremely interesting dissertation about the nature of case marking on adverbials in Korean. entitled “Structural case on adjuncts”. In addition to David Pesetsky, Adam Albright, and Norvin Richards, Prof. Heejeong Ko joined the committee from Seoul National University, via Zoom. Here is Eunsun’s abstract:
In my dissertation, I investigate case marking on adverbials in Korean. In a number of unrelated languages, there are adverbials that get marked with accusative case in active sentences. A question that arose in the face of these adverbials is whether they bear structural accusative case (like objects do), or inherent/lexical accusative case. In order to answer this question, researchers have observed what happens under passivization. If the accusative case on the adverbial is replaced by nominative, it is most likely behaving as structural case; if the adverbial retains its case under passivization, it is behaving like inherent/lexical case. Interestingly, languages behave differently in the face of this diagnostic. German and Russian adverbials keep their accusative case, while Finnish adverbials become nominative-marked. Complicating the picture even further, Korean adverbials allow both nominative and accusative case.
I argue that Korean adverbials bear structural case like their Finnish counterparts. In the talk, I will demonstrate that whether an adverbial bears nominative or accusative case correlates with the syntactic position of the subject. I will then provide an explanation for this correlation based on two factors. The first is the competition between the theme and the external argument to move from Spec, VoiceP to Spec, TP. The second factor is the successive-cyclic Dependent Case model. By doing so, the dissertation shows that a syntactic theory of case can do much more than one might imagine. The complexities of Korean case-marked adverbials have led some researchers to argue against a purely syntactic analysis of case on these adverbials. But I demonstrate that the same mechanism that assigns case on subjects and objects can account for case on adverbials as well.
Congratulations, Eunsun!!
