Defending a Move & Delete Analysis of Korean Extraposition

Abstract

Park, Myung-Kwan. (2023). Defending a move & delete analysis of Korean extraposition. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 31(3), 89-111. This paper defends a Move & Deletion analysis for Korean Extraposition advanced in Park and Kim (2009). Rejecting Abe’s (2019) covert Move (scrambling) & Late Merge analysis proposed for Japanese Extraposition and concurring with Ko’s (2022b) empirical assessments of Korean Extraposition that pose potential challenges to Abe’s approach, we keep to the idea proposed in Park and Kim (ibid.) that only a relative clause (RC)/AP undergoes LBC-violating overt scrambling from the second clause, which is in turn subject to ellipsis thereby repairing an LBC violation. This analysis is shown to have several advantages. Unlike covert QR to derive Extraposition in English, scrambling feeding Extraposition in Korean can be successive-cyclic, thereby obviating the Right Roof Constraint in this language. Since in Korean there is no covert or overt movement of the NP modified by a RC, the NP is correctly predicted to have narrow scope below a higher scope-bearing element. As in Korean there is no Late Merge fed by covert movement, the R-expression contained in a relative clause always violates Binding Condition (C). We also show what Ko (2022a) terms ‘deep LBC effects’ arise not only in Korean and English and does not count as a challenge for the Move & Delete analysis in deriving Extraposition.