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The Syntax of Korean VP Anaphora: an Experimental Investigation

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The Syntax of Korean VP Anaphora: an Experimental Investigation Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) The syntax of Korean VP anaphora: an experimental investigation Kyeong-min Kim · Chung-hye Han · Keir Moulton Received: date / Accepted: date Abstract The Korean VP anaphor (VPA) kuleha or kulay ‘do so’ has often been argued to involve ellipsis of an articulated VP structure, which is replaced with the surface form at PF (e.g., Cho 1996; Ha 2010; M-K Park 2015). In this paper, we present empirical data that does not support such a characterization, obtained from two experimental studies designed to diagnose the presence of “hidden” syntactic structure. In Experiment 1, building upon Kim and Han’s (2016) finding that quan- tificational binding of Korean pronoun ku ‘he’ is subject to inter-speaker variation, we conducted a truth-value judgment task experiment to examine the (un)acceptability of sloppy identity interpretation in the VPA construction. If the VPA is indeed de- rived from the deletion of an articulated VP, and thus has an unpronounced internal structure to house ku, the distributions of the sloppy reading of ku and the quantifi- cational binding of ku should be correlated across the sampled population; however, such a pattern was not found. In Experiment 2, we conducted a Likert scale rating experiment testing whether extraction out of the VPA site is possible. If the VPA is an instance of ellipsis, extraction from the VPA site should be possible since there Kyeong-min Kim Department of Linguistics, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6, Canada E-mail: kyeongmin [email protected] Chung-hye Han Department of Linguistics, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6, Canada E-mail: [email protected] Keir Moulton Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G3, Canada E-mail: [email protected] 2 Kyeong-min Kim et al. would be a syntactic structure that hosts an extractable constituent. This prediction, however, was not confirmed. On the basis of these empirical findings, we argue that Korean VP anaphora are base-generated pro-forms (Bae and Kim 2012; M-K Park 2013), and retrieve their semantic values from the context through interpretive rules (Hoji 1998, 2003), as in the case of pronominal resolution. Keywords VP anaphora · Ellipsis · Pro-form · Sloppy reading · Scrambling · Truth- value judgment task · Likert scale task · Korean 1 Introduction Cross-linguistically, it is possible to convey intended ideas without using full verbal expressions that would otherwise be necessary. A well-known example illustrating this fact is the English VP ellipsis construction given in (1). Here, a VP appears to have been omitted after will in the second conjunct (denoted by [VP ]), but is nevertheless readily interpreted as identical to the phonologically overt VP in the first conjunct. (1) The boys will [VP happily eat those Paleo carrot flatbread rounds with butter 1 and jelly], and Boogie will [VP ] too. The Korean VP anaphora construction, the linguistic phenomenon of interest in this paper, is another case in point, as illustrated by the examples in (2) and (3).2 (2) Wangca-tul-i [VP ku-eyke yelsimi kul-kwa yepep-ul prince-PL-NOM he-from enthusiastically writings-and manners-ACC paewu]-ess-ko, Cwumong-to kuleha-yess-ta. learn-PAST-CONJ Cwumong-also so.do-PAST-DECL ‘The princes learned writings and manners from him enthusiastically, and Cwumong did so, too.’3 1 www.unfancymama.com/2014 03 01 archive.html 2 Some researchers, e.g., Hankamer and Sag (1976), Partee and Bach (1984), use the term VP anaphora (or VP anaphor) to refer to verbal anaphoric items in general, which include null anaphoric VPs, i.e., VP ellipsis. Throughout this paper, however, we only use the term VP anaphora to refer to overt anaphoric VPs such as Korean kuleha/kulay and English do it, following the convention used in Matsuo and Duffield (2001), Cecchetto and Percus (2006), and Y Lee (2012). 3 www.dev.emcampus.com The syntax of Korean VP anaphora 3 (3)A:[ VP Eceypam-ey ku kongphoyenghwa-lul poko-nase cam-ul last.night-at the scary.movie-ACC watch-after sleep-ACC selchi]-ess-e. bad.sleep-PAST-DECL ‘I had a bad sleep last night after watching the scary movie.’ B: Na-to kulay-ss-e. I-also so.do-PAST-DECL ‘I did so, too.’ The VP anaphor kuleha ‘do so’ and its phonological variant kulay in (2) and (3) are immediately interpreted as identical to the longer and structurally more complex VPs in the first conjunct, [VP ku-eyke yelsimi kul-kwa yepep-ul paewu] ‘learn writings and manners from him enthusiastically’ and [VP eceypam-ey ku kongphoyenghwa-lul poko-nase cam-ul selchi] ‘have a bad sleep last night after watching the scary movie’, respectively.4 The primary aim of this paper is to provide novel empirical evidence that sheds new light on the syntactic status of Korean VP anaphors, which is the key to understanding how they come to receive their intended interpretations, despite the absence of otherwise expected lexical elements. There are two main existing proposals for the syntax of Korean VP anaphora. One is that VP anaphors are base-generated verbal pro-forms (Bae and Kim 2012; M-K Park 2013). Under this view, kuleha in (2) or kulay in (3) refer anaphorically to the event or situation introduced into the discourse by the VP in the first conjunct, analogous to how an overt pronoun such as him in (4) may refer to the entity denoted by an antecedent DP. (4) Mary hated [DP the old man who moved in from the east coast], but Lisa liked him very much! Under the VP pro-form analysis, the second conjunct of (2) can be represented as in (5a) in the overt syntax and LF, and as (5b) at PF (with irrelevant details suppressed). (5) VP pro-form 4 The VP anaphors kuleha and kulay can be used interchangeably in (2) and (3), with no apparent difference in meaning. 4 Kyeong-min Kim et al. a. Overt syntax and LF: b. PF: TP TP 0 0 DPsubj T DPsubj T Cwumong-to VP T Cwumong-to VP T kuleha kuleha In contrast, an alternative, and relatively more prevalent, view takes VP anaphors to be instances of ellipsis phenomena (e.g., Cho 1996; Son 2006; Madigan 2015; M- K Park 2015). To illustrate, consider the example of English VP ellipsis (1), which is repeated below in (6) (hereafter, strikethrough texts indicate elided material). (6) The boys will [VP happily eat those Paleo carrot flatbread rounds with butter and jelly], and Boogie will [VP happily eat those Paleo carrot flatbread rounds with butter and jelly], too. The standard view of VP ellipsis in current research in the Principles and Parameters framework and in the Minimalist Program is what is generally referred to as the PF- deletion approach (Chung et al. 2011:2; see also, among many others, Sag 1976; Chomsky and Lasnik 1993; Heim and Kratzer 1998; Tancredi 1992; Johnson 2001; Merchant 2001; Kennedy 2003; Buring¨ 2005). The gist of it is as follows. A regular VP is constructed in syntax (e.g., happily eat those Paleo carrot...with butter and jelly in (6)), but may be “deleted” at the level of Phonological Form (PF) under identity with an antecedent VP, i.e., an overt VP elsewhere in the discourse. Syntactically, the inaudible VP constituent remains intact with a fully represented structure. So, for instance, its Logical Form (LF), which gets passed to the semantic component for interpretation, is identical to the pronounced VP.5 In a similar vein, the Korean VP anaphora phenomenon has also been analyzed as an output of the PF-deletion process. That is, a fully-articulated VP generated in syntax may get “replaced” (and thus “deleted”) at PF by surface forms such as kuleha or kulay, complying with “a pronunciation rule that applies only when [the] VP is identical to another one” in the discourse context (Cecchetto and Percus 2006:79). 5 For expository purposes, we follow Sag (1976), Heim and Kratzer (1998), Fox (2000), and Kennedy (2003) in imposing a parallelism condition on (VP) ellipsis constructions requiring that the elided con- stituent has an antecedent constituent with an identical representation at LF. Alternative semantic accounts of parallelism/identity, such as Merchant’s (2001) E-GIVENness, are consistent with the proposals in this paper. The syntax of Korean VP anaphora 5 Under this ellipsis analysis, the derivation of the second conjunct in (2), repeated below in (7), can be understood as illustrated in (8).6 (7) ..., Cwumong-to kuleha-yess-ta. ..., Cwumong-also so.do-PAST-DECL ‘(The princes learned writings and manners from him enthusiastically, and) Cwumong did so, too.’ (8) VP Ellipsis a. Overt syntax and LF: TP 0 DPsubj T Cwumong-to VP T PP V0 ‘from him’ AdvP V0 ‘enthusiastically’ DPobj V ‘writings and manners’ ‘learn’ 6 The VP anaphor kuleha consists of two components kule ‘so’ and ha ‘do’. The issue of how they are syntactically distributed within a verbal projection does not fall within the scope of the current study. Throughout this paper, kuleha is treated as if it is a non-decomposable string that simply corresponds to a VP, as shown in (5) and (8). See, however, M-K Park (2015) for the claim that ha, as a light verb, comes under v, and it takes a VP complement that is replaced by kule, as shown in (i). See also Stroik (2001) and Hallman (2004) for a similar analysis of do so in English, as shown in (ii).
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