Notes on Two Types of Fragments

Abstract

Ahn, Hee-Don and Cho, Sungeun. 2011. Notes on Two Types of Fragments. Linguistic Research 28(1), 19-35. Korean has two types of fragments: Case-marked and case-less fragments. We suggest that they must be treated differently: Case-marked fragments are derived from TP ellipsis, while caseless fragments are just CPs directly dominating non-sentential NPs. Patterns of fragments containing negative polarity items or temporal adverbs support our claim that caseless fragments do not correlate with any sentential source. One of the issues regarding the architectures of grammar is whether the pragmatic/semantic factors come into play independently from syntax. Culicover & Jackendoff (2005) suggest that the grammar consists of parallel generative components, at least independent components for phonology, syntax, and semantics, each of which creates its own type of combinatorial complexity (this architecture of grammar is often called parallelism). This paper aims to defend the syntactocentrism advocated in Minimalism led by Chomsky (1995) that the grammar permits sound structure and semantic/pragmatic structure to interact only by way of syntax proper by exploring two kinds of fragments in Korean.