Chung-hye Han

V-Raising and Grammar Competition in Korean: Evidence from Negation and Quantifier Scope

In a head-final language, V-raising is hard to detect since there is no evidence from the string to support a raising analysis. If the language has a cliticlike negation that associates with the verb in syntax, then scope facts concerning negation and a quantified object NP could provide evidence regarding the height of the verb. Even so, such facts are rare, especially in the input to children, and so we might expect that not all speakers exposed to a head-final language acquire the same grammar as far as V-raising is concerned. Here, we present evidence supporting this expectation. Using experimental data concerning the scope of quantified NPs and negation in Korean, elicited from both adults and 4-year-old children, we show that there are two populations of Korean speakers: one with V-raising and one without.

Handling Stuctural Divergences and Recovering Dropped Arguments in a Korean/English Machine Translation System

This paper describes an approach for handling structural divergences and recovering dropped arguments in an implemented Korean to English machine translation system. The approach relies on canonical predicate-argument structures (or dependency structures), which provide a suitable pivot representation for the handling of structural divergences and the recovery of dropped arguments. It can also be converted to and from the interface representations of many off-the-shelf parsers and generators.

The Syntax of Whether/Q… Or Questions : Ellipsis Combined with Movement

In this paper, we argue that the syntax of whether/Q...; or questionsinvolves both movement of whether/Q and ellipsis of the type that hasbeen argued to exist for either ... or constructions. Three argumentsare presented: (i) English whether/Q ... or questions present at thesame time movement characteristics (sensitivity to islands) and ellipsistraits (focus pattern on the disjuncts); (ii)crosslinguistic data on the surface string syntax of Subject-Object-Verb(SOV) languages support the ellipsis plus movement account in general and,thus, indirectly also for English; and (iii) certain asymmetries betweenI whether/Q...or and either...or are resolved, permitting aunified account of the two types of constructions.

Are There “Double Relative Clauses” in Korean?

It has been claimed that Korean allows the relativization of another relative clause, deriving the double relative clause. The presence of double relative clauses has led some researchers to argue that Korean relative clauses do not involve any operator movement, but instead involve a mechanism such as unselective binding (Sohn 1980, Y.-S. Kang 1986), where an operator binds variables in situ. In this squib, we argue that there is no true double relative clause, thus no real threat to the operator movement analysis for relative clauses in Korean. More specifically, we propose that double relative clauses are derived from double nominative constructions, through relativizing the first nominative NP that originates from an IP-adjoined position. Given our analysis, double relative clauses are not instances of island violations, and the operator movement analysis for relative clause formation in Korean can thus be maintained

Disjunction, focus, and scope

This article presents the observation that disjunction cannot take wide scope in negative non-wh-questions and declaratives with a preposed negative element. This rules out the alternative question reading for non-wh-questions with preposed negation and the wide scope or reading for neg-inverted declaratives. We show that effects parallel to the ones associated with preposed negation can be reproduced in affirmative non-wh-questions and declaratives when focus is involved. We propose that preposed negation in non-wh-questions and preposed negative adverbials in declaratives necessarily contribute focus marking (in particular, verum focus) and argue that the lack of wide scope disjunction reading in both declaratives and non-wh-questions results as a by-product of the interaction between focus and the LF syntax of disjunctive structures, which we argue involves ellipsis.

On Negative Imperatives in Korean

In this paper, we address two questions concerning negative imperatives in Korean: . (i) what is the morpho-syntactic nature of mal in negative imperatives?; and (ii) why is it impossible to form negative imperatives with short negation an? We will argue that the clause structure of imperatives include a projection of deontic modality and a projection of imperative operator encoding illocutionary force, and that mal is a lexicalization of long negation and deontic modality. We then propose that a negative imperative with short negation is ruled out because such construction maps onto incoherent interpretation which can be spelled out as I direct you to bring about a negative state or a negative event.

A Morphological Tagger for Korean: Statistical Tagging Combined with Corpus-Based Morphological Rule Application

This paper describes a novel approach to morphological tagging for Korean, an agglutinative language with a very productive inflectional system. The tagger takes raw text as input and returns a lemmatized and morphologically disambiguated output for each word: the lemma is labeled with a part-of-speech (POS) tag and the inflections are labeled with inflectional tags. Unlike the standard approach to tagging for morphologically complex languages, in our proposed approach the tagging phase precedes the analysis phase. It comprises a trigram-based tagging component followed by a morphological rule application component, obtaining 95% precision and recall on unseen test data.

Comparing Lexicalized Treebank Grammars Extracted from Chinese, Korean, and English Corpora

In this paper, we present a method for comparing Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars extracted from annotated corpora for three languages: English, Chinese and Korean. This method makes it possible to do a quantitative comparison between the syntactic structures of each language, thereby providing a way of testing the Universal Grammar Hypothesis, the foundation of modern linguistic theories.

Endogenous sources of variation in language acquisition

Significance Children are exposed to vast quantities of data exhibiting the key structural features of their language. Are these structural features acquired from the data or are they imposed on the data by learners? We identify a piece of grammatical knowledge that is systematic within an individual speaker but varies unpredictably across a population of speakers of ostensibly a single language. Further, parents’ knowledge in this domain does not predict children’s knowledge. The independence of parents’ and children’s knowledge indicates that the relevant grammatical structures are not acquired from experience, but are supplied by learners. This dissociation between the grammatical knowledge of children and their parents demonstrates that children actively construct grammatical knowledge from highly ambiguous evidence. A fundamental question in the study of human language acquisition centers around apportioning explanatory force between the experience of the learner and the core knowledge that allows learners to represent that experience. We provide a previously unidentified kind of data identifying children’s contribution to language acquisition. We identify one aspect of grammar that varies unpredictably across a population of speakers of what is ostensibly a single language. We further demonstrate that the grammatical knowledge of parents and their children is independent. The combination of unpredictable variation and parent–child independence suggests that the relevant structural feature is supplied by each learner independent of experience with the language. This structural feature is abstract because it controls variation in more than one construction. The particular case we examine is the position of the verb in the clause structure of Korean. Because Korean is a head-final language, evidence for the syntactic position of the verb is both rare and indirect. We show that (i) Korean speakers exhibit substantial variability regarding this aspect of the grammar, (ii) this variability is attested between speakers but not within a speaker, (iii) this variability controls interpretation in two surface constructions, and (iv) it is independent in parents and children. According to our findings, when the exposure language is compatible with multiple grammars, learners acquire a single systematic grammar. Our observation that children and their parents vary independently suggests that the choice of grammar is driven in part by a process operating internal to individual learners.

A Tree Adjoining Grammar Analysis of the Syntax and Semantics of it It-Clefts

In this paper, we argue that in it-clefts as in It was Ohno who won, the cleft pronoun (it) and the cleft clause (who won) form a discontinuous syntactic constituent, and a semantic unit as a definite description, presenting arguments from Percus (1997) and Hedberg (2000). We propose a syntax of it-clefts using Tree-Local Multi-Component Tree Adjoining Grammar and a compositional semantics on the proposed syntax using Synchronous Tree Adjoining Grammar.