Further Notes on Intervention Effects on Reconstruction

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the domain and properties of reconstruction of long-distance scrambled phrases in Korean. We argue that Beck & Kim’s (1997) intervention effect can be extended to reconstruction cases, which corroborates the conclusion made by Bae (2020). The main evidence comes from the data showing that long-distance scrambled phrases (outside their base positions) can interact with the syntactic operations such as binding and also affect semantic interpretation of idioms. In particular, we show that the interpretive option for anaphors and idioms is determined by how far reconstruction can be implemented. The result further suggests that binding condition A is not a derivational condition in Korean (contra Belleti & Rizzi 1998).