Single/Multiple Fragments with NUN

Abstract

This paper investigates the Korean ‘what/how about’ construction. In Korean, unlike English, the wh-question word ‘what/how’ is typically phonologically suppressed and the particle ‘-(N)UN’ is used, corresponding to the English preposition ‘about’. Departing from Chung’s (2021) recent work on this construction, this paper makes three claims. First, three distinct uses of this construction indicate that ‘-(N)UN’ can be not only a contrastive topic marker but also a (contrastive) focus marker. Second, the underlying representation of this construction is that the pre-‘(N)UN’ part has a clausal structure that undergoes elision, leaving behind single or multiple fragment remnants. Meanwhile, the post-‘(N)UN’ part has ettehkey toy(-ess)-ni ‘what happened’/ etteh-ni ‘how’/ ettehkey ha-l ke-ni ‘how do you cope with’, where ettekey or etteha- asks a polar or wh-constituent question relating to the pre-‘(N)UN’ clause. Third, the formation of single or multiple fragment remnants is achieved via Move & Delete, where more specifically Move is the operation of scrambling widely available to the Korean language.