Shim, JI Young (2011) Locality in Movement and Scope Interpretation of In-Situ Wh-Phrases. MA by research thesis, University of York.
Abstract
The dissertation investigates syntactic distributions and interpretations of wh-phrases in Korean and other languages from a minimalist perspective, and reveals patterns of similarities and differences between wh-in-situ languages and wh-movement languages. First, this dissertation examines Korean long distance wh-scrambling with respect to anti-radical reconstruction and semantic effects, arguing that Korean long distance whscrambling is motivated by discourse properties such as contrastive focus; hence long distance scrambling in Korean is not a purely optional movement but follows Scope Economy. This dissertation notes that left periphery movement of a wh-phrase in Korean is not a unitary construction: there is movement of a wh-phrase by an agreeing question morpheme, and movement of a wh-phrase by a non-agreeing question morpheme. This dissertation suggests that both wh-movement and wh-scrambling uniformly are motivated by an optional edge feature (Chomsky 2005) that marks specificity or definiteness when present. Second, this dissertation explores the correlation between superiority effects in whmovement and head movement in head-final languages (e.g. Korean and Japanese), headinitial languages (e.g. English), and V2 languages (e.g. German and Spanish). Based on crosslinguistics data, the dissertation considers that in head-final languages such as Korean and Japanese, head movement may not occur at narrow syntax, whereas in other languages it obligatorily takes place, hence V-to-C is very closely related with the presence or absence of superiority, offering an analysis of the presence and absence of superiority effects in whmovement in Korean (and Japanese): movement from a nonphase-edge to a phase-edge gives rise to superiority effects, but movement from a phase-edge to a phase-edge overrides superiority effects. Third, this disserttaion focuses on wh-scope interpretations between in-situ wh-phrases and the licensing heads (i.e, Q-morpheme) in Korean, proposing a local modeling of a nonlocal dependency that establishes a long distance wh-scope agreement relationship, a mechanism of indirect Agree mediating between a licensing head and wh-elements in an embedded clause. The dissertation argues that, in Korean, both wh- phrasal movement and wh-scope interpretations are constrained by local operations that the Minimalist Program takes to be one of the vital properties of the faculty of language.
Metadata
Awarding institution: | University of York |
---|---|
Academic Units: | The University of York > Language and Linguistic Science (York) |
Depositing User: | JI Young Shim |
Date Deposited: | 12 Oct 2015 12:28 |
Last Modified: | 12 Oct 2015 12:28 |
Download
Shim_Final_MA_Thesis
Filename: Shim_Final_MA_Thesis.pdf
Licence:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License
Export
Statistics
You do not need to contact us to get a copy of this thesis. Please use the 'Download' link(s) above to get a copy.
You can contact us about this thesis. If you need to make a general enquiry, please see the Contact us page.