Korean Resultative Construction Redux

Abstract

I claim that the result phrase in Korean resultative construction is an adjunct à la Shim and den Dikken (2007). At the same time, diverging from them, I argue that the result phrase in Korean transitive resultative construction projects a finite CP, whereas the one in the intransitive resultative construction projects a nonfinite CP, based on important differences between the two resultative constructions. The present proposal can address various properties of Korean resultative construction in their entirety, including case on the antecedent NP, iteration of the result phrase, and obviation of the direct object restriction (Levin and Rappaport,1995) as distinct from English resultative construction. The present research has an important implication on the cross-linguistic variation in the syntactic representation of the result phrase: adjunct in Korean and complement in English (Kayne, 1985; Van Voorst, 1986; Hoekstra, 1988; Carrier and Randall, 1992)