earticle

영어

This paper investigates the syntactic structure for the agreement attraction of the subject in English and the honorific subject or goal in Korean in terms of the subject or goal and verb(al predicate) agreement. The subject-honorific verbal ending si or goal-honorific verb tulita in Korean belongs to the verbal predicate. The subject-verb agreement in English is mistakenly affected by the feature percolation in the syntactic structure between an agreement target and a local attractor. The [+/-PL] feature in English and [+/-HON] feature in Korean, which undergo upward or downward percolation other than [WH], are also suggested to be a local attractor for the subject or goal and the verb(al predicate) agreement. In the coordinate structure of English subjects and Korean subjects or goals, the [+/-PL] feature or the [+/-HON] feature of the NP closer to the agreement target is a strong one, which undergoes upward percolation to the entire subject or goal DP. This is contrary to Jang and Kim’s (2021) suggestion that the plural feature percolates into the DP because it is a strong one. Last but not least, this is why coordinate elements in Korean subject or goal positions do not necessarily follow the animacy hierarchy.