Pre- vs. Post-verbal Asymmetries and the Syntax of Korean Right Dislocated Construction

Abstract

Among various important issues pertaining to the so-called right dislocated construction (RDC) in Korean are the basic word order in Korean and the grammatical relation the right dislocated (RDed) element assumes with the preceding predicate. 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 Korean conforms to Kayne's (1994) universal SVO word order hypothesis, due to the very existence of the construction, and the RDed element is a direct dependent of the preceding predicate. In contrast, Chung (2008a, 2009, 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 reduced from an independent clausal element due to a massive ellipsis process, 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.