Syntax-Semantics Interface and Licensing of Nominals.

Abstract

This paper inquires how Syntax-Semantic interface interacts with nominal licensing within the framework of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995 et seq), a derivational model of grammar under which Syntax strictly precedes Semantics. Within this view, syntactic operations should not be motivated by semantic features even though they may be present in Syntax. The inquiry is pursued by investigating three seemingly independent case phenomena in Korean: Accusative adverbial nominals, Accusative Case alternation/stacking and Part-whole constructions. I demonstrate that Syntax-Semantics compatibility is crucial to licensing of nominals in Korean and propose that nominal licensing in general may even be reduced to LF legibility. The theoretical implication is that Legibility Conditions inspect not only the erasure of uninterpretable features but also non-feature-related, general semantic well-formedness.