Earticle

Semantic research on generics has centered on the existence of a determiner in a generic NP because generics are mostly presented in bare plurals in English and in definite NPs in Romance languages. Hence, generic sentences in languages without determiners require special treatment. This study reviews previous theoretical analyses of generic interpretations in determiner-less languages and proposes that countability in Korean is determined by humanness. Given the distinction between count and mass nouns, generic interpretations in Korean reveal patterns similar to those found in English.

This paper reexamines a sequence of sound changes, i.e. Old English Breaking and Anglian Smoothing, based on the representational account in Kwon (2004). With a battery of markedness and well-formedness constraints along with faithfulness constraints, and with the constraint-reranking mechanism, this paper shows that an Optimality-theoretic approach can successfully account for these two seemingly paradoxical sound changes in OE. The results of this paper will also show that sound changes like Old English Breaking and Anglian Smoothing, both occurring largely in the same phonological environment, have to be understood as non-directional fluctuation between two opposite tendencies and thus make a strong case for non-teleological sound changes.

This paper aims to show that CP deletion in English and Korean is not possible. We suggest that the absence of CP ellipsis results from the premise that lexical categories such as V don't bear an E feature, hence cannot license the deletion of their CP complements. We claim that apparent CP ellipsis is equivalent to DP deletion, which is subsequently subsumed to the occurrence of Pro.

While illocutionary force of exclamation is manifested by many different sentence types, it is controversial what kind of sentences have sentential force of exclamatives. Drawing upon some recent works such as Michaelis and Lambrecht (1996b), Ginzburg and Sag (2000), and Zanuttini and Portner (2003), this paper focuses on essential semantic properties of exclamatives, factivity and scalar implicature. We argue that in English, not only wh-exclamatives but also inverted exclamatives and nominal exclamatives are characterized as exclamative constructions by these semantic properties. Departing from Zanuttini and Portner (2003), who, linking such semantic properties to syntactic components, recognize a factive marker and wh-operator as key syntactic elements, this work proposes an analysis in which different syntactic forms exhibit the same core semantic properties of exclamatives. While none of the previous analyses account for the three different types of exclamatives, i.e., WH, inverted, and nominal exclamatives by a coherent mechanism, the present paper provides a unified account of their semantic properties within the framework of HPSG, with their syntactic differences taken care of by different phrasal type constraints.

In this paper, I am concerned entirely with code switching within sentences, i.e. intrasentential code switching. Specifically, this study examines Spanish/English and Korean/English code-switched utterences, in order to test "the Equivalence Constraint" proposed by Poplack (1980). I claim that the Equivalence Constraint cannot be a code-switching restriction on "word order mapping" between the two languages, because there are counterexamples in which, even if the word order is different between L1 and L2, the code-switching is possible if it does not involve the phrasal head. To explain these data, I propose Head Constraint on Code-Switching: If L1 has a unique phrase structure which is not shared with L2, the head which licenses the structure must be lexicalized in L1 while the other constituents can be randomly filled from either lexicon.

The English middle construction is an ideal device to express a certain property of a patient in a relatively simple form. This property of the middle’s patient is understood as a state since it does not refer to an actually happening event. The present paper is an attempt to analyze this superficial stativeness of the English middle which appears as a property of a patient. Considering aspectual property of the middle participating verbs, affectedness of the sentential subject, and semantically involved agent, I claim that the English middle is a structure which includes the underlying level of transitivity. Precisely, the English middle retains a transitive event structure which is formed through a process of filtration. To account for the middle’s latent event structure, I propose three types of aspectual and discourse features co-functioning within the event frame-‘complete telicity ([+TEL])’, ‘non-terminativity ([-TER])’, and ‘reboundability ([+REB])'. The feature, [+TEL], qualifies the verbs of accomplishment, of achievement, and of motion as the middle verbs while the feature, [-TER], filters out the verbs that announce terminative completion of an event. Another feature, [+REB], stipulates the relationship between a middle participating verb and its immediate argument. Together with all three features above, the event structure of the English middle is brought to completion and ready to be transferred to a property of a patient.

This paper investigates the comparative processing difficulty of dative and subject relative clauses in Korean, using an eyetracking method. Previous studies of relative clauses have concluded that an object gap is more difficult to process than a subject gap across languages. Two possible explanations for this subject-gap preference are that an object gap is a) structurally more distant from its head or b) linearly more distant from its head than a subject gap. The explanation in (a) predicts that a dative gap should be more difficult to process than a subject gap in Korean while that in (b) predicts the relative ease of a dative gap. The current results of response times and question-answering accuracy confirmed the subject-gap preference: that is, subject gaps were processed faster and more accurately. Eye movement patterns also showed a difference between the two gap types in the amount of active eye movements and fixation durations, indicating that a dative gap is more difficult to access and thus takes more time to process. Thus the current study provides support for the structural distance hypothesis.

The standard treatment of the English preposition of is syntactic by nature; i.e. of is a dummy case-assigner (Chomsky 1981). Contrary to this idea, of imposes strict semantic restrictions on the preceding and following nominals. For instance, in 'A of B', A can be a part, and B can be a whole (e.g. the legs of the table), but not vice versa (*the table of the legs). In the product-material relationship, however, both the table of wood and the wood of the table are possible English phrases. This paper aims to spell out ontological properties of of from the perspective of language acquisition. To achieve this goal, I analyzed longitudinal data of eight children at age points of 3, 4, 5, and over 9 from the CHILDES (= Child Language Data Exchange System) database (MacWhinney and Snow 1985, 1990). Using the CLAN software, I extracted all utterances of the subject children that include the uses of of, and analyzed the data with reference to pre-defined sense categories of of. Surprisingly, the well-known examples that are cited as evidence for a dummy case assigner are not found at all in the child language data. Rather, English-speaking children use a handful number of fixed expressions that contain of, most of which are part/quantity phrases or simple collocations. Based on this finding, I argue that of is a relational functor that defines a restricted number of semantic relations over a concept network.

This paper explores the idea that Korean Negative Polarity Items (NPIs hereafter) are licensed within an extended minimal domain of the extended projection of the head containing [+NEG], where the head with [+NEG] is part of the extended projection of verbal negation (Grimshaw 1991). This idea is expected to account for the following two properties exhibited by Korean NPI licensing, which have not been satisfactorily captured in terms of the well-known clause-boundedness: i) Korean NPIs are licensed outside the scope of negation, and ii) only direct arguments or adjuncts of a negative predicate are subject to NPI licensing.