Subject Raising in Korean Redux: Base-generated Left Dislocation

Abstract

I will deal with subject raising of a finite complement clause in Korean. I critically review two proposals which have thus far attracted the most attention: raising for case approach and prolepsis approach. I will show that neither approach provides a satisfactory account for the relevant data. I suggest that the putative accusative case of the subject of the finite complement clause is in fact an instantiation of a topic morpheme, subject to topicalization comparable to left dislocation in English. I hence diverge from the standard assumption in the literature since Choi (1961) that lul is invariably accusative case morpheme. The present proposal has a nontrivial crosslinguistic implication, shedding new light on our understanding of the true nature of so called exceptional case marking constructions in languages typologically akin to Korean.