On Polarity Licensing in the -ul swu iss Construction

Abstract

Polarity licensing has been a central topic for the syntactic structure of the -ul swu iss modal construction in Korean since Choe (1988) first raised the issue. To deal with this issue, various theories have been proposed in the literature (Choe 1988, Ha 2005, 2007, Chung 2006, 2007, Kim 2014, 2015, Tchoe 2015, among others). This article evaluates the theoretical and empirical mileage those theories cover, specially examining how they account for the apparent violation of the clause mate condition in polarity licensing and the semantic restrictions that the modal construction displays. It will be shown that no theories thus far advanced are able to perfectly accomodate the polarity licensing in the modal construction, soliciting further research for a more complete theory.