On the Repairability of the Coordinate Structure Constraint in Korean and Its Implications

Abstract

It has been widely assumed that certain island violations are ameliorated by ellipsis. However, Merchant(2001) argues that the second part of the Coordinate Structure Constraint(CSC) in English is not a PF-island and thus its violations cannot be repaired/ameliorated. This paper aims to investigate the repairability of the CSC in Korean. It is shown that as in English, the second part of the CSC (ban on extraction out of conjuncts) is not repairable by ellipsis in Korean. I first show that constructing relevant data is evasive due to some confounding factors. However, I demonstrate that when these factors are carefully controlled for, the data invariably respect the CSC, yielding no repair effects. Comparing the CSC with the relative clause island, I suggest that while the relative clause may well constitute a PF-island, the CSC does not. I also argue that the relevant data are problematic for the in-situ ellipsis approach