earticle

영어

This paper is concerned with interpreting small clauses in English and Korean and its implications. With the argument that the embedded subject of infinitives and small clauses is raising into the higher clause, based on the assumption that the syntactic configuration of small clauses correlates to their semantic interpretation, which in turn is considered to reflect the discourse/cognitive concepts such as thetic/categorical judgments, I propose that small clauses are a categorical statement and that the obligatory raising of the small clause subject is motivated not just by Case-theoretic reasons but also its need to get interpreted as presuppositional or specific. The advantage of this analysis lies in that it enables us to capture both the clausality or propositionality and the semantic import of the small clause relevant to discourse/cognitive facts.