Single/Multiple Fragments with NUN

• Published in: Lanaguage Research Vol. 57; no. 3; pp. 379 - 400
• Main Author: Park, Myung-Kwan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Seoul 서울대학교 언어교육원 01.01.2021; Seoul National University; 언어교육원
• Subjects: Clauses; English language; Function words; Korean language; Reduction (Phonological or Phonetic); Syntactic structures; Wh phrases; Word order; 언어학; Delete; fragment; (N)UN; Move & Korean ‘what about’; contrastive focus; wh-less
• ISSN: 0254-4474; 2586-7113
• DOI: 10.30961/lr.2021.57.3.379

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.