Two Issues in Korean Negative Imperatives

Abstract

This paper aims at explaining (i) why negative imperatives are allowed in Korean, as opposed to many Indo-European languages such as Italian, Modern Greek and Spanish; and (ii) why only a specific type of long form negation (LFN), namely mal, is available in Korean negative imperatives. First, we argue with empirical evidence that Korean permits TP in imperatives, a necessary condition for the presence of NegP in Zanuttini’s (1996) cross-linguistic generalization that licensing of NegP is contingent upon the presence of TP. The current view is distinguished from most previous research as the latter simply takes it for granted that Korean is among a group of languages allowing negative imperatives, without seriously considering the issue in the cross-linguistic context. Second, we claim that the reason only NegP headed by LFN mal can appear in Korean negative imperatives is that the NegP of this kind is selected by Jussive Phrase where not only a person feature but also a feature of [+deontic] is encoded. This idea is a reminiscent of Han and Lee (2007) in which they suggest that the deontic feature is specified in ModP in charge of deontic modality. Departing from Han and Lee, however, we do not postulate ModP, but assume Jussive Phrase advanced by Zanuttini, Pak and Portner (2012). Our analysis appealing to ‘the selectional restriction’ can be supported by the fact that LFN mal is not possible in the lower clause of key-ha ’let’ imperatives in Korean, and can be extended to their kin clause types such as exhortatives (cf. Pak et al. (2004)).