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Article published In:
Language and Linguistics
Vol. 25:4 (2024) ► pp.747–784

The syntax of Korean reduced conditionals

Right edge and pronominalization

| Northwestern University
| University of Seoul
The goal of this paper is to provide an analysis of two important aspects of conditional clauses in Korean. The first goal is to reveal the structure of the conditional clause. In investigating reduced conditionals and regular copula clausal conditionals, we suggest the right-periphery of conditional clauses based on the Split CP hypothesis (Rizzi 1997; Saito 2010). The second goal is to examine the distribution of the clausal pronoun kukes in reduced conditionals, which, we argue, is the result of FinP ellipsis, building on the ellipsis theory of pronominalization (Baltin & Craenenbroeck 2008). In doing so, we make two empirical points: (i) the parallelism regarding argument/adjunct asymmetry indicates that reduced conditionals are derived from clausal conditionals; and (ii) various connectivity effects reveal hidden clausal structure behind the pronominal element kukes, which means that there is a tight connection between focus constructions and conditional constructions in Korean. The implication of the present study is that we can argue against a simple-minded dichotomy of anaphora that says there are two types of anaphora, Deep and Surface, and Deep anaphora does not have syntactic structure.
Keywords: reduced conditional, right periphery, pronominalization, conditional adverb, ellipsis, Korean
Article outline
  • 1.Backgrounds: Reduced conditionals in Korean
    • 1.1Roadmap
  • 2.The focus-conditional link
    • 2.1Pronominal sluicing and pronominal conditionals
      • 2.1.1Properties of KPS
      • 2.1.2Properties of KPRC
  • 3.The analysis of focus constructions in Korean
    • 3.1Common properties in focus constructions
    • 3.2Analysis: Configurational pronominalization
  • 4.The analysis of KPRC
    • 4.1Further properties of KPRC
    • 4.2Right periphery of conditionals in Korean
    • 4.3The derivation of KPRC
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • List of abbreviations
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 27 June 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00168.yoo
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