Abstract for Yunju Suh's talk

Hidden clauses in Korean nominative object constructions
Yunju Suh (Stony Brook University)
November 15, 2005 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

In this talk a new analysis for the so-called nominative objects in Korean is proposed. Nominative object (NO) phenomenon in Korean was often ascribed to the 'stativity- of certain transitive predicates such as psych adjectives (Ura 1999 and Kang 1986, among others), which deprives these predicates of the ability to assign accusative case to the direct object. However, this view is against the premise that nominative case is purely structural, assigned/checked under the presence of T (Chomsky 2001), since it allows nominative case assignment conditioned by a lexical idiosyncrasy. I argue that the apparent NO of Korean psych adjectives is actually the subject of an embedded clause with a covert predicate. Four types of evidence are given to support the biclausal structure of psych adjective constructions: ambiguous associations of temporal adverbials in NO constructions, NOs- ability to control PRO in an adjunct clause, nonreferential reading of NOs, and de re/de dicto ambiguity of NOs. Psych adjective constructions are contrasted with psych verb constructions in which the object is accusative marked, and none of the biclausal characteristics are observed. Based upon this distinction I claim that the syntactic peculiarity of psych adjective construction as opposed to other transitive predicates lies in the internal structure of the complement, rather than the dubious lexical property of 'stativity'.