A Bi-clausal Approach to Coordinated Wh-questions in Korean

Abstract

According to Citko & Gracanin-Yuksek (2013), there are three different structures in a new typology of coordinated wh-questions (CWHQs): mono-clausal, bi-clausal with bulk sharing, and bi-clausal with non-bulk sharing. This paper presents a non-bulk sharing bi-clausal approach to Korean CWHQs, which is a modified version of Citko & Gracanin-Yuksek’s original structure. Our analysis has two strong advantages against the existing studies about wh-in-situ languages (Kasai 2016; Jung 2018, inter alia). First, from a theoretical perspective, it does not need any stipulated syntactic mechanism such as sideward movement or backward ellipsis. Second, from an empirical perspective, it can account for some of the syntactic or semantic puzzles appearing in the previous analyses. The Korean CWHQ structure involves focus movement of each of wh-phrases contained in different vPs. The target position of focus movement is the specifier and complement position of &0, a head of &P, which requires focused wh-phrases. This paper argues that a bi-clausal structure is a better option in analyzing Korean CWHQs.