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. Müllers (2017) reassociation, Ishiis (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.