Cartographic Decomposition of Korean Locative PPs

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to provide an explicit semantic decomposition of the meanings of Korean locative PPs and their corresponding syntactic projections. I first investigate a diversity of phrasal modification found in English and Korean locative PPs, comparing the orders and structural relationships of PP-internal modifiers. Modifying elements investigated in this paper are deictic elements, directional adverbials, measure phrases, and the adverbs right and just. The diversity found in modification system of locative PPs is captured as layered arrays of PP-internal categories. In English, all of them are on the left of the core array [Place-AxPart-K-DP]. In Korean, measure phrases and the adverb palo come in between [DP-K] and [AxPart-Place] and deictic elements come on the left of [DP-K]. Complexity of constituent arrays in Korean locative PPs is explained based on the KP movement. The Ground KP moves to the specifier of AxPartP or to the specifier of PlaceP. The KP movement is triggered by the edge features of AxPart and Place, and the KP is assigned a semantic effect source in their edge positions.