An Elliptical Coordination Analysis of the Right Dislocated Construction in Korean

Abstract

The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal. 17(4). 1-23. This paper concerns itself with the syntax of the so-called right dislocated construction (RDC) in Korean. Taking the RDC as a crucial piece of evidence, J-S Lee (2007a,b, 2009) claims that Korean conforms to Kayne's (1994) universal word order (SVO) hypothesis. His claim sustains only when the RDC is analyzed as a mono-clause such that the post-verbal elements in the RDC belong to the propositional domain of the preceding predicate. Such a mono-clausal analysis hardly accounts for various properties that the RDC displays, including the fact that the RDC is a root phenomenon. The Korean RDC rather seems to be more readily accounted for by a bi-sentential analysis, as argued for the Japanese counterpart in the literature (Kuno 1978, Tanaka 2001, etc.). Some revision of the bi-sentential analysis is in order, however, because the RDC behaves like a mono-sentential, though not mono-clausal, structure. To account for both the mono-sentential properties and root properties at the same time, the current work proposes an elliptical coordination analysis, wherein two (or more) matrix clauses are coordinated and ellipsis has applied to the non-initial clauses.