• Language and Information
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.73-91
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• 2004

The nominative and accusative postpositions in Korean may intervene between the negative auxiliary verb ANH and its complement verb phrase. As Korean is an OV language, this means that 'verb + {nom, acc} + ANH' as well as the simpler concatenation 'verb + ANH' is possible. This fact, together with an overwhelming regularity of these postpositions' optionality in virtually all constructions, poses a problem for formal approaches to the syntax of the language. Working in a constraint-based grammatical framework shaped by such works as Sag and Wasow (1999) and Copestake (2002), we put forth type hierarchies for major_class, which represents verb inflection, and for pos, which has two immediate subtypes, i.e., htrp_pos and ord_pos. What we call the 'half transparency' of the case postpositions separates them from all the other lexical items in the language. The type htrp_pos is used to constrain one of the two newly proposed head_comp_rules, where a newly proposed feature HEAD2 of a phrase inherits its value from the HEAD feature of the head word. The COMPS list of the negative auxiliary ANH is seen as containing a single phrase whose HEAD is a kind of nominal clause and whose HEAD2 is something that is one of the three maximal types: acc, nom, and null.

• Language and Information
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.71-84
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• 2010

The aim of this paper is to propose that a category P is encapsulated within a functional layer above the lexical layer, just like vP containing a lexical VP. As is well known, the category P has long been in the obscure domain of syntactic studies: Marantz (2001) and den Dikken (2003), for example, argue that P is a lexical category, but Emonds (1985), Grimshaw (1991), and Baker (2003), maintain that the category P is functional and is a closed category without its own intrinsic meaning. On the other hand, Zwart (2005) argues that it does have some meaning. Following the works of Svenonius (2003, 2006, 2007), and the spirit of Rizzi's (1997) split CP hypothesis, we elaborate and develop Svenonius' idea of split-pP analysis with detailed schematic representations of the novel examples in English, Korean, and Chinese in this paper. Unlike Svenonius, however, this paper incorporates KP into pP-Shell, which is a substantial simplification. Furthermore, Chinese Localizers that have long been considered as Postpositions are now under the category of Prepositions. This proposal renders an X-bar theoretic consistency over the categorical status of Chinese phrasal structures. In short, the present analysis accounts for inconsistency found in English complex preposition phrase (Quirk, et al, 1972, 1985), Chinese circumposition phrase (Ernst 1988, Liu, 2002) and Korean postposition phrase in a unified and consistent manner. Furthermore, by proposing a finer-grained phrasal architecture for the category P, the controversial status of the category subsides within this analysis.