Some peculiarities of Korean KES cleft constructions

Abstract

This paper investigates the Korean cleft construction focusing on the following three facts: i) argument clefting is immune from wh-islands, while adjunct clefting is strictly clause-bound, ii) structural Cases must be dropped in the focus phrase while quasi adjunct postpositions can optionally appear, and iii) the presence or absence of the postposition in the focus phrase has an effect on locality; when the postposition is dropped, the clause-boundedness effect disappears. To account for these data, we propose a novel analysis of Korean cleft constructions by relating clefting to scrambling. Adopting Boskovic and Takahashi's (1998) approach to scrambling as base-generation, we show that base-generation of a null operator, which is followed by lowering for Case reason, can capture the peculiar locality facts. Lowering being driven by the need to check Case feature, it is only available with NPs, but not with non-NPs, in accordance with Last Resort. This explains the clause-boundedness of adjunct clefting. The lack of wh-island effects in argument clefting also naturally follows since Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 1990), defined in terms of c-command, is irrelevant to lowering, as Bogkovic and Takahashi showed. The effect of postposition dropping on locality is shown to provide strong support for Case-driven lowering. As for the obligatory dropping of structural Case in the focus phrase, we argue that structural Case is never assigned to the focus phrase by the verb inside the cleft clause. Rather, the focus phrase is selected by the copula verb as an argument, as Sharvit (1999) proposed. Since copula verbs are not able to assign either Nominative or Accusative Case, the lack of structural Case in the focus phrase is expected.