Negative Imperatives Revisited

Abstract

At PF, when the merger of the morphological features takes place in Korean, the negative imperatives are ungrammatical, if negation blocks the [imp] feature in C from merging with the verb. Short/long form Neg (hereafter, SFN/LFN) is a head of NegP between vP and TP and mal dont in negative imperatives is a lexical spell-out of a combination of Neg and [Imp-Op] in C. Hence, while mal-negative imperatives are possible, short/long form negative imperatives are not. SFN is a syntactic construction, a prefix attachment. In this vein, the SFN imperative of the morphological causative construction is ungrammatical. When negative prefixes such as pwul, pi, and mi are attached to a predicate, imperatives can be formed with the predicate because there is no functional head Neg which blocks the [Imp] feature in C from merging with the verb. These suppletive forms such as molu(-ta) not know and eps(-ta) not exist behave like other regular short-form syntactic negations (Chung 2007b). This is why the imperatives of suppletive negations are ungrammatical.