earticle

영어

The claim that SVO is a basic word order for Korean receives growing justification from recent studies like Lee (2007a,b; 2008a). This paper consolidates this position by considering another piece of empirical evidence: An object wh-phrase must be analyzed as undergoing leftward movement from the postverbal position to the preverbal position, dubbed Object Lifting. This proves that the basic word order is SVO in Korean.
The current result thus secures non-vacuous object movement and also supports Kayne (1994)--the universal word order is underlyingly SVO and there exists no rightward movement. The cause of Object Lifting is identified as a focus feature in the relevant vP domain. In Chinese, a language widely known to be SVO, Object Lifting is spurred by a specificity/focus feature, and
some instances of this operation are adduced to cross-linguistically corroborate the current view. The lack of Object Lifting in English is attributed to the absence of the focus feature in the vP domain. Thus, Korean, Chinese and English, now all starting with the uniform SVO underlying order, manifest different surface word orders depending on the presence/absence of the
specificity/focus feature in question.