The Syntax of Prohibitive Negation mal- in Korean: Beyond Modality to Speech Act Structure and Person Features

Abstract

This study investigates the morphosyntactic and semantic conditions underlying imperative negation in Korean, focusing on the auxiliary verb mal-, which expresses prohibitive force (‘Don’t do’). Traditionally, mal- has been analyzed as a morphological fusion of the negative morpheme an(i) ‘not’ and the light verb ha- ‘do’, realized under the presence of deontic modality (Han & Lee 2007). While this Distributed Morphology approach captures the co-occurrence of negation and obligation, it fails to explain why mal- alternates with an.h- in various deontic contexts and why it is excluded from others that also encode deontic meanings, such as evaluative or permissive expressions. Building on cross-linguistic research in the syntax of imperatives, this paper proposes that the occurrence of mal- is determined not solely by modality but by person features and speech act structure. Specifically, mal- appears when negation operates within a directive configuration, where the Person (Pers) head agreeing with the subject interacts with the Addressee node in the Speech Act Phrase (SAP) (i.e., the Mood Phrase in Korean, in conventional terminology) to encode the participant roles of speaker and addressee. This interaction yields the morphological realization of mal- in imperatives, propositives, and related directive environments, but blocks its use in factual or evaluative clauses. The analysis demonstrates that the distribution of mal- reflects a syntactic encoding of speaker–addressee relations rather than deontic modality alone. By linking negation, person agreement, and speech act structure, this study provides new evidence that Korean morphosyntax directly encodes communicative roles, offering broader implications for the grammar of directives and negation across languages.