earticle

영어

Exceptional case-marking(ECM) in linguistics is a phenomenon in which the subject of an embedded infinitival verb in English seems to appear in a matrix clause and, if it is a pronoun, is unexpectedly marked with object case morphology. The unexpected object case morphology is deemed “exceptional”. Transitive secondary resultative constructions in Korean have nonfinite CP structures which include a null pro or a bare noun of inalienable possessums, or partitive elements in the subject position. The current paper investigates into the syntactic peculiarities of the transitive resultative construction in comparison with the ECM construction. It also delves into the syntactic position and the discourse effect phenomenon of the (fake) ECM element in the two types of constructions. We note that in the typical ECM construction, the matrix transitive verb takes a complement clause as a direct object, but in the transitive resultative constructions, the transitive verb takes a fake ECM element as a direct object. We suggest that the fake or pure ECM element occupies the matrix Spec-v* as a sentential contrastive topic, although the two elements are syntactically different in that one is a direct object of the matrix transitive verb and the other is an adjunct positioned in the matrix Spec-v*.