CANCELLED Lecture: Heejeong Ko

This lecture has been cancelled and will be rescheduled for a future date.

Postverbal adjuncts and rightward concatenation

In this talk, I examine the syntax of postverbal adjuncts (PAs) in Korean, which include postverbal adnominal and adverbial modifiers. The syntax of PAs, as a type of right-dislocation, has received much attention in the literature. Some studies argue that the PA is a fragment which survives clausal ellipsis (e.g. Chung 2009, 2012, Park and Kim 2009). Others claim that a pro-predicate (or LF-copying) licenses the PA (e.g. Lee 2010, Yoon 2013). In this paper, however, I present some empirical evidence against the previous studies, which treat PAs as a consequence of PF-ellipsis or LF-copying. Rather, I propose that PAs are concatenated to the host clause, as an instance of latest merger (cf. Lebeaux 1988, Hornstein and Nunes 2008, Fox and Nissenbaum 1999, Hunter and Frank 2014). I show that this proposal not only explains long-standing puzzles concerning PAs, but also captures the fact that the syntax of PAs is regulated by a general constraint that operates across different sub-structural domains. I also show that rightward concatenation does not occur randomly but is restricted by focus-assignment in the host. I conclude the talk with a comment on theoretical implications of this study for the theory and typology of extraposition in language.