Abstract for Heejeong Ko's talk

Underlying constituency and cyclic linearization
Heejeong Ko (MIT)
March 1, 2005 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

In this talk, I investigate the underlying constituency and consequences of cyclic linearization in the Inalienable Possession Construction and Floating Quantifier Construction in Korean. I argue that the inalienable Possessor forms a constituent with its associate NP in the underlying structure, whereas the Case-Marked numeral does not form a constituent with its associate NP. Evidence for this proposal is drawn from striking parallels between the Possessee and the Caseless numeral in their distribution, and also from a variety of asymmetries between subject-oriented numerals and object-oriented numerals and between Caseless numerals and Case-Marked numerals. The paper also demonstrates that the proposal for Korean Caseless numerals may extend to Japanese counterparts. This paper sheds light on the properties of linearization in scrambling and on locality conditions in movement.