Pre-vs. Post-verbal asymmetries and the syntax of Korean RDC

Abstract

Among various important issues pertaining to the so-called right dislocated construction (RDC) in Korean are the basic word order and the grammatical relation the right dislocated (RDed) element assumes to the rest of the structure. In his series of papers, J.-S. Lee (2007a,b, 2008a, 2009a,b, 2010, 2011, 2012) proposes a mono-clausal analysis of Korean RDC, according to which the RDed element is a direct dependent of the preceding predicate and Korean conforms to Kayne's (1994) universal SVO word order hypothesis due to the very existence of the RDC. In contrast, Chung (2008a, 2009b, 2010, 2011) advocates a non-mono-clausal approach, as in Tanaka (2001) and Kato (2007) for Japanese RDC, according to which the RDed element is taken as a fragment of a continuing sentence to which massive ellipsis has applied, while the head-finality is preserved. The current work tries to show that RDed elements cannot be viewed as direct dependents of the preceding predicate due to various asymmetries observed between pre- vs. post-verbal positions, favoring a non-mono-clausal analysis of Korean RDC. © 2012 The PACLIC.