earticle

영어

This paper is concerned with null functional categories in Korean and its purpose is to show that they are accounted for in a principled manner by the Empty Category Principle, which implies that the Empty Category Principle is extended to accommodate a variety of functional categories. Attempts have been made to account for null complementizers and null determiners in various languages using the Empty Category Principle (Lamontagne and Travis 1987, Butler 1989, Hong 1994, Ahn 1996, and Lee 2004). In this paper, we will deal with various verbal and nominal affixes in Korean, which are generally assumed to belong to C, D, or P. First, we will discuss Comp -ko appearing in different types of embedded CPs and show that -ko can be phonologically null only if it satisfies the Empty Category Principle by being properly governed. Then we will discuss nominal affixes such as -ey, -eykey, and -lo and argue that they should be properly governed in order to be phonologically empty.