Abstract
In this article we offer a prosodic account for the sentence-medial attachment phenomenon of the particle -yo in Korean. Adopting a derivational approach to prosodic hierarchy formation, we argue that once the particle attaches to the edge of a prosodic unit that Spell-Out defines, it has to be placed at the edge of a prosodic constituent throughout the prosodic derivation. We show that this prosodic account also provides an uncomplicated explanation for certain phenomena which remain puzzling for previous syntactic/morphological analyses.
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Notes
The following abbreviations are used in this article: acc = accusative; C = complementizer; dat = dative; gen = genitive; nmz = nominalizer; nom = nominative; top = topic; Q = interrogative.
It should be noted that Lee (1976) provided no examples of the sort that we ourselves examine in this article, such as ones in which -yo occurs in sentence-medial positions (-yo attachment). Still, he deals with fragment answer-type cases like “Noun-yo,” “Adverb-yo,” etc.
Lee and Park (1991) found (2a) grammatically marginal (“??”). However, consultants of ours including ourselves find the sentence worse than that; hence, “*”.
In the phonetic tone tier, ‘Ha’ = the final H tone of an “accentual phrase” (φ in our terms); HLIP = an HL ι-boundary tone (HL%); and in the word tier, yo- NF and yo- F = sentence-medial and sentence-final -yo, respectively.
Kim and Yim (2014) original pitch tracks including the one cited here do not explicitly mark ι-boundary tones with the symbol %, but the HL ι-boundary tone is clearly observed on each occurrence of -yo in (9) (see Kim and Yim (ibid. p. 40) for detailed discussion).
See Kim (2010) for the experimental evidence showing that the right edge of right dislocated material has an ι-boundary tone.
To the best of our knowledge, Choe et al. (1999) is the only study to examine the prosody of the focus-associated particle -man ‘only’ in Korean. Their concern is, however, to compare the regular use of -man with its emphatic use.
One of the anonymous reviewers casts doubt on the grammaticality judgments of the sentences in (20). We informally consulted some native speakers, and all of them agreed with us. As well, many similar sentences can be found on the Internet.
As is well known, there have been debates over whether overt V-raising applies in SOV languages such as Korean. In this article, we assume that there is no V-raising in Korean, following Yoon (1994a) and Han and Park (1994), among many others. To the extent that a Multiple-Spell-Out-based mapping mechanism like the one adopted here is on the right track, the phrasing facts to be discussed in Sects. 4.2 and 4.4 will argue for the non-V-raising approach since a raised V would not be spelled-out together with any other preceding material.
It should also be noted that the basic phrasing in Korean is often assumed to be “(Subj) (Obj V)” in much of the previous literature, including Kim (1997). We assume, however, that such phrasing results from a restructuring of the basic phrasing which is prosodically motivated. More specifically, we assume that V and Obj are not phrased together in the default phrasing created by Spell-Out and that V is phrased with Obj when V is prosodically light. Thus, in the language, it is observed that even the subject is phrased with the verb in an intransitive construction:
The subject, which is usually independently phrased, is phrased with the following verb. That is, a size constraint is operative in Korean, and both of the phrasings “(Subj V)” and “(Obj V)” result from prosodically motivated restructuring.
See Takahashi (2011) for a similar idea on the interaction of Case with phasehood. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this point to our attention. Note also that Spell-Out here and throughout in the article refers to the transfer to PF. Transfer to LF might work differently, as discussed by Marušič (2009).
Although we do not go into the details of the phrasing of topics in Korean in this article, we assume, in line with Frascarelli (2000), that a topic phrase occupies the Spec of Topic Phrase in the left-peripheral position, and Spell-Out applying to it creates an independent ι containing the topic. In our model, prosodic phrase formation proceeds derivationally, first creating φ’s and then creating ι’s. For the correspondence between topic and ι-phrasing in other languages, see, e.g., Frascarelli (2000) for Italian, Frota (2000) for European Portuguese, and Kanerva (1990) for Chichewa.
An anonymous JEAL reviewer suggested an alternative analysis where -yo is actually a prosodic element like a boundary tone that is attracted to right edges, on a par with the edge phenomena discussed extensively in the prosodic literature. We would like to consider this intriguing alternative analysis in our future research.
It remains to be seen if the present approach could be recast in some form of a constraint-based framework such as Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 2004). We will leave this issue for our future research.
A JEAL reviewer points out that a DP with modifiers cannot contain a -yo within it though the whole DP can host one. In (i), the right edge of the entire subject can host a -yo whereas each of the genitive modifiers cannot host any even though they form their own φ’s, as shown in (ib) and (ic).
Apparently, this seems to be incompatible with our observation that -yo is attached to the right edge of a prosodic phrase. Although the full analysis of such data goes beyond the scope of this article, we would like to point out that the rigid application of the present prosodic phrasing mechanism to the complex DPs like (i) in fact results in recursive φ’s (see Ito and Mester 2012 and Selkirk 2009, 2011) due to the DP-internal Spell-Out. Thus the correct phonological phrasing is not (ib) but (ii) below:
Since ι’s, which always dominate φ’s in the prosodic hierarchy, are formed by combining φ’s, the embedded DPs (Yeona-uy, kajeonggyosa-uy, and yeodongseng-uy) are inaccessible to ι-formation. Then they can never be immediately followed by an ι-boundary, and -yo cannot attach to them due to the constraint in (45). We leave a detailed analysis of this for future research.
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Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of the article were presented at the Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar (SICOGG) 15 and the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL) 9. We thank David Adger, Takamichi Aki, Kiyong Choi, Saetbol Kim, Shigeru Miyagawa, Hisao Tokizaki, John Whitman, Draga Zec, and the audiences for their comments and suggestions. Some of the material here has appeared in Yim and Dobashi (2015). As well, we thank the four anonymous reviewers of Journal of East Asian Linguistics for insightful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are ours. Changguk Yim is first author.
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Yim, C., Dobashi, Y. A prosodic account of -yo attachment in Korean. J East Asian Linguist 25, 213–241 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-016-9142-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-016-9142-9