earticle

영어

Since Chomsky (1995, 2001) suggested that head movement be excluded from the core operations of narrow syntax, relegating it to the PF-branch of the computation, researchers have attempted to eliminate head movement from narrow syntax entirely or to find alternatives to the earlier narrow-syntactic approach to head movement. Even with these more refined proposals, however, it still remains unclear why head movement should not be part of narrow syntax. The question becomes even more acute when empirical facts suggest the other way around, that is, the existence of syntactic head movement. In this paper, I will argue that head movement is not necessarily a PF operation by showing that Korean does allow narrow-syntactic head movement, albeit partially, and explore how the observed syntactic head movement can be accommodated within the current minimalism. More specifically, it will be argued that the verb-inflection complex in Korean results from either V-to-T movement or V-to-C movement at narrow syntax, and that in the case of V-to-T movement, the V-T complex combines with the independently merged C via morphological merger at PF. Assuming so, I will further argue, along the line suggested in Suranyi (2005, 2007, 2008), that Korean syntactic head movement goes through reprojective processes (i.e., root merger) at syntax, hence obviating the violation of the Extension Condition and the c-command condition.