Positional Restrictions on Multiple NPIs in Korean

Abstract

The primary purpose of this paper is to investigate word order restrictions on multiple NPIs in Korean, focusing on the interactions among N-pakkey ‘exclusive only N’, amwu-(N)-to ‘any N’ and han-(N)-to ‘even one N’. While questioning grammaticality judgments established by previous studies (Kuno and Whitman 2004, Sells 2006), this paper first represents a new set of data revealing that N-pakkey is required to occupy the leftmost position of a sentence when cooccuring with to-NPIs, whereas the two different forms of to-NPIs are unconstrained. Following Horvath (2007)’s Exhaustive Identification (EI) operator that triggers focus movement into a sentence-initial position, this paper suggests that the exceptive meaning of N-pakkey introduces the EI operator that makes the non-leftmost N-pakkey move into the sentence-initial position, which salvages the grammaticality of a sentence. This paper further suggests that the word order restrictions on multiple NPIs accord with an intervention effect on NPI licensing (Linebarger 1987) where the EI-associated N-pakkey plays an intervening role in the interpretation of to-NPIs.