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A compositional mechanism for pairwise predication in the Korean Left-Node Raising construction

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Abstract

This paper investigates the various properties of the so-called Korean Left-Node Raising (LNR) construction, including its interpretation when a summative or symmetrical predicate occurs at the left periphery. While previous authors (Nakao in Proceedings of the 33rd annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium, University of Pennsylvania working papers in Linguistics, vol 16, pp 156–165, 2010; Chung in Stud Gener Gramm 20:549–576, 2010; Park and Lee in Stud Gener Gramm 19:505–528, 2009) focused on the syntactic connection between a coordinate phrase and its shared element at the left periphery, the exact compositional mechanism for the interpretation of the LNR construction has remained unaddressed in the literature. Building on the previous authors’ claim regarding the parallels between the so-called ‘respective’ reading and the RNR construction in Korean and English (Park and Lee, 2009; Chaves in J Linguist 48(2):297–344, 2012; Kubota and Levine in Nat Lang Linguist Theory 34(3):911–973, 2016b), I compositionally analyze the interpretation of the Korean LNR construction in terms of a pairwise predication within the framework of Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar (Kubota in (In)flexibility of Constituency in Japanese in Multi-Modal Categorial Grammar with Structured Phonology, 2010; Kubota in Nat Lang Linguist Theory 32:1145–1204, 2014; Kubota in Linguist Inq 46:1–42, 2015; Kubota and Levine in OSU working papers in Linguistics, vol 60, Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University, pp 21–50, 2013; Kubota and Levine in Nat Lang Linguist Theory 34(1):107–156, 2016a; Kubota and Levine in Type-Logical Syntax, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2020). I argue that the proposed analysis straightforwardly captures not only the interpretation of the Korean LNR construction with summative/symmetrical predicates, but also the other properties such as occurrence of the plural marker -tul, case-matching patterns, long-distance dependency, and island insensitivity.

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Notes

  1. The pivot in the LNR construction can be associated with more than two conjuncts, as illustrated below:

    figure a

    In this paper, I focus on the LNR sentences that contain only two conjuncts like (1). But the proposed analysis can be straightforwardly extended to the examples with more than two conjuncts like (i).

  2. The term ‘internal reading’ was first used in Carlson (1987).

  3. The LNR sentences with a summative predicate can also receive the non-additive reading; for example, (3) can be uttered felicitously when a total of five books were taken away by Chelswu and five more books were thrown out by Yenghi.

  4. A symmetrical predicate occurring as a pivot in the LNR construction also invokes an external reading, according to which the properties denoted by the conjuncts are attributed to the contextually salient entity which is introduced in a prior discourse.

  5. Analogous patterns have been observed with honorific-marking in Korean and Japanese, and taken to argue against the pro-analysis of the LNR construction (Nakao 2010; Park and Lee 2009; Chung 2010).

  6. The external reading can arise from (15) if there is a contextually salient entity so that the antecedent and its coindexed null pronominal can refer to it.

  7. Nakao (2010) refers to the internal reading as ‘distributive scoping’ reading, following Abels’s (2004) work on Right-Node Raising constructions.

  8. When it comes to island insensitivity, it is not easy to make a judgment on the acceptability of the two sentences that exactly correspond to the LNR example. This is because each conjunct in long-distance LNR sentences like (8) shares not only the pivot but also the matrix clause predicate. Consider the following example, which corresponds to (8b):

    figure s

    In (i), repeating the same matrix clause predicate in two sequential sentences itself sounds odd. Given this difficulty with grammatical judgments on relevant examples, I do not further discuss whether the pro-analysis can account for the lack of island effects in the LNR construction, but leave it for future research.

  9. See Kubota (2015) for his argument against the movement-based analysis of Japanese RNR construction, which is based on the sets of examples that are parallel to Korean LNR sentences.

  10. Whereas the LNR sentences in (21) are not available with the internal reading, they can receive the external reading in an appropriate context.

  11. In this paper, I do not deal with an expression which should be analyzed as being of syntactic category N, but it is necessary for the analysis of NP-internal elements, as follows:

    figure aa

    According to (i), ku ‘that’ takes an expression of N like chayk ‘book’ on its right, and then produces an expression of NP.

  12. This scrambling operator has essentially the same form as the topicalization operator utilized in Kubota and Levine’s (2016b) analysis of English topicalization.

  13. See Gawron and Kehler (2004) for a semantic mechanism based on the notion of sums.

  14. Henceforth, I restrict the use of the curly brace notation to multisets.

  15. I do not incorporate the temporal interpretation of the LNR construction into the proposed formalization. But see Lee and Tonhauser’s (2010) compositional analysis of the temporal interpretation in Korean coordination constructions.

  16. A reviewer pointed out that the first derivational step in Fig. 5 is technically flawed since a multiset of functions of type \(<e,t>\) is itself not a function of type \(<e,t>\). This can be salvaged by positing a distributive operator (e.g. Gawron and Kehler 2004) or deriving it from the \(\mathbf {resp}\) operator along the lines proposed in Kubota and Levine (2014) (with the support of the ‘product duplicator’ operator). For the sake of illustration here, I do not introduce such operators in the current proposal, but see footnote 21 for more discussion on the treatment of distributivity and its ensuing technical problems.

  17. Chaves (2012) analyzes the ‘respective’ reading from examples like (33a) as a special case of cumulative readings in the sense of Scha (1981). In his analysis, the adverb respectively semantically restricts the cumulative reading by way of being a bijective function which satisfies a contextually-determined or linearly-ordered ranking among the described entities. He formulates this idea in terms of Link’s (1983) sum operator \(\oplus \), which is lexicalized in the meaning of a conjunction as follows:

    figure aj

    According to (i), the conjunction and conjoins two individuals or eventualities, and their shared dependents are either identified (i.e. \(\hbox {x}_{n} = \hbox {y}_{n}\)) or distributed (i.e. \(\hbox {x}_{n} \ne \hbox {y}_{n}\)). Chaves argues that a ‘respective’ reading arises when the sum operator \(\oplus \) is interpreted as a plurality-forming cumulation (i.e. \(x_{0} \ne y_{0}\)). But see empirical problems with this analysis in Kubota and Levine (2016b).

  18. Recall that we assume three syntactic categories in Hybrid TLCG: N, NP, and S. In (45), I use VP for the sake of simplicity, and it is the abbreviation of \(NP_{nom} \backslash S\) (in the case of an intransitive verb), \(NP_{acc} \backslash (NP_{nom} \backslash S)\) (in the case of a transitive verb), \(NP_{acc} \backslash (NP_{dat} \backslash (NP_{nom} \backslash S))\) (in the case of a ditransitive verb).

  19. The multiset resulting from the combination with -tul can contain more than two members, but I assume that its cardinality is two in (45) for reasons of simplicity; recall that we deal with the LNR sentences containing two conjuncts in this paper, but the proposed analysis can be easily applied to more complicated cases with more than two conjuncts such as (i) in footnote 1.

  20. A reviewer pointed out that the derivations in Figs. 11 and 12 can be simplified by plugging in the adverb directly in the hypothesis indexed as k in Fig. 11. This process, which is called proof normalization (Kubota 2021), cannot be applied to the cases with summative and symmetrical predicates; since they introduce the existiential quantification over multiset-denoting entities, their syntactic type cannot be lowered to NP. For reasons of exposition, I do not incorporate this normalization process in the proposed analysis of the cases with the plural -tul, but see Kubota (2021) for more details.

  21. As correctly pointed out by a reviewer, if we posit a generalized distributive operator or a similar sort in line with Gawron and Kehler (2004) and Kubota and Levine (2014), then they pose an overgeneration problem for -tul-marked adverbs and singular subjects; this is because the ‘plural’ adverb would be incorrectly interpreted with respect to a ‘singular’ expression in a distributive way, without incurring any semantic type mismatch. I suggest that one possible solution would be to reformulate the tul-marking in the LNR construction in terms of event plurality, which has been defined as ‘a situation in which multiple instantiations of an event are distributed temporally and/or spatially (Song and Dubinsky 2018: 360)’; See Lim (2000), Yim (2001), Lim (2012) as well. The fact that the -ko-coordination construction like (12) denotes multiple eventualities naturally follows from its temporal interpretation: the non-final conjunct of the ko-construction can be untensed, and its temporal reference is not necessarily determined by an overt tense realized in the final conjunct but it can be determined by other factors like Aktionsart, time adverbs, and discourse context (Chung 2005, Lee and Tonhauser 2010). The current proposal is not couched within the ‘event lattice’ framework (Hinrichs 1985; Bach 1986; Krifka 1989; Link 1987; Lasersohn 1995 inter alia), but the treatment of the tul-marking in terms of event plurality will enable us to resolve the overgeneration issue of the distributivity operator as well as to incorporate the patterns of the temporal interpretation into formalization. I leave this for future work. I am very grateful to the reviewer for drawing my attention to this issue.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments on the earlier versions of this manuscript. I acknowledge that the current manuscript has been significantly improved by incorporating their suggestions. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A5A8028726). I would like to thank them for the financial support. My thanks also go to the editors and the editorial assistant of JEAL in their wonderful support for the revision process.

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    Jungmee Lee

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Lee, J. A compositional mechanism for pairwise predication in the Korean Left-Node Raising construction. J East Asian Linguist 30, 177–215 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-021-09224-0

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