Sentential Subjects, Subjectless constructions, and Phasehood

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show the internal structure of what has been called “Korean Subjectless constructions”, headed by ‘-kes’ with ‘katha’ (=seem)-type predicates, as opposed to Sentential Subject constructions. Based on accounts of English sentential subjects in different types of predicates(Schueler 2004, Alrenga 2005), it is argued that (i) Korean ‘-kes’ CP in Type I predicates, i.e., ‘seem’-type predicates, is in situ inside the corresponding VP/PredicateP just like the CP in English Expletive constructions, although ‘-kes’ CP displays some syntactic phenomena that supports C-to-T(via v) movement, (ii) Korean Sentential subjects, headed by ‘-kes’ with Type II predicates appear in Spec-TP, whose position is occupied by the thematic null DP in the case of English sentential subjects, and (iii) this particular instance of C ‘-kes’ is a defective category, projecting to CP, which casts challenge to the theory of Phase(Chomsky 2000, 2001) given that Phase be “immutable and stable”. The theoretical consequence of this paper, therefore, demands the relaxation of Phasehood; Phase extension in the sense of Gallego(2006, 2007) and Dikken(2007, 2008). Furthermore, this proposal resists what Boskovic(1997) has argued for; some matrix clauses can be just VPs and at least the matrix clauses of Korean Subjectless constructions are not of the VP types.