earticle

영어

It has been argued in this paper that Korean reflexives and pronouns reveal murky cases where dependent terms c-command QPs at PF and that syntactic coindexations cannot not distinguish between a BVA reading and a group reading. Here a BVA reading and a group reading induced by Korean plural dependent terms are attributed to a property of the Korean plural morpheme tul and the dual readings induced by the plural dependent terms are accounted for by adopting linking at LF. That is to say, the dual readings can be disambiguated by adopting linking after QR, depending on whether the dependent terms are linked to the trace of QR or the operator itself at LF. To account for the semantic difference between singular terms and plural terms, all we need to assume here is that the interpretative difference between singular terms and plural terms results from the Korean bound morpheme tul. Put in a different way, the Korean plural morpheme tul functions as a dependent term which induces a group reading and a BVA reading, whereas singular reflexives function as a distributor which induces a BVA reading. This semantic difference between singularity and plurality in Korean leads us to conclude that in Korean, a structurally singular NP functions as semantically singular, whereas a structurally plural NP functions either as semantically singular or plural. As a result, the Korean plural dependent terms reveal dualistic number properties: structurally they function only as plural, and semantically either as singular or plural.