Locality in Movement and Scope Interpretation of In-Situ Wh-Phrases

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.