The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Tuesday, October 7, at 3-4pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/bQ4IXlJxTTShVcMHOosNtQ
Hannah Katinsky (McGill) will be presenting “Right dislocation in Korean.” Here is the abstract:
In many canonical head-final languages, the presence of postverbal elements is found to be grammatical under certain discourse conditions. The purpose of this talk is to provide a descriptive overview and theoretical analysis of postverbal phenomena in Korean, which is referred to as Right Dislocation (RD) in the Korean literature. Cross-linguistic analyses of RD are divided based on two major variables: whether the structure is assumed to be mono-clausal or bi-clausal, and whether the postverbal element is assumed to undergo movement or be base-generated in postverbal position. Following Ozturk (2014)’s analysis of Uyghur Turkic, I argue against a bi-clausal analysis and posit that the behavior of RD in Korean can be captured through a mono-clausal rightward movement approach. The availability of rightward movement in a given language seems to be correlated with EPP effects, allowing for cross-linguistic generalization and pointing towards a unified approach to postverbal phenomena in head-final languages.