Speaker: Heejeong Ko (Seoul National University)
Title: Late Adjunction after Spell-out: Evidence from Right-Dislocation
Time: Friday, April 9th, 7pm – 8:30pm
Abstract: In this talk, I closely examine the syntax of postverbal adjuncts (PAs) in Korean – which received relatively little attention, in comparison to postverbal arguments in right dislocation (cf. Ko 2015, Yoon 2016, Park and Kim 2016 for Korean; Abe 2019 for Japanese). In the first part of the talk, I aim to establish empirical evidence against major approaches to right-dislocation which treat PAs as a consequence of rightward movement, PF-ellipsis, or English-type extraposition. Further developing Ko (2015), I propose that PAs in Korean are late-adjoined to the host after Spell-out via concatenation (Hornstein and Nunes 2008, cf. Müller’s (2017) reassociation, Ishii’s (2017) self-pair Merge; cf. Fox and Nissenbaum 1999, Fox 2017, Overfelt 2017 for Late Merge in English extraposition). I show that this proposal not only explains intricate puzzles concerning PAs, but also captures the interesting fact that the syntax of PAs is regulated by a general constraint on sideward movement in inter-arboreal domains. Evidence for my claim is drawn from various tests which involve right root effects, island effects, depth of embedding in LBE, NPI licensing, and scope/binding in postverbal domains in Korean. Theoretically, the current research provides novel support for the existence of non-conventional Merge in natural languages: concatenation (Merge without integration in syntax) and inter-arboreal Merge (Merge across different workspaces). I also suggest that typological differences between Korean PAs and English adjunct extraposition can be attributed to two factors: i) the timing of Late Merge and ii) strict head-finality in syntax & massive agglutination in Korean morphology.