대한언어학회 전자저널

Jo, Jung-Min. (2021). Revisiting cleft(-like) constructions in Korean. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 29(4), 45-64. This paper examines two putative cleft constructions in Korean: Kes-construction and Ki-construction. Since both constructions denote the same truth-conditional meaning along with the similar information structure of topic and focus, it could be conjectured that similar morphosyntactic processes are responsible for deriving the two constructions. Park and Kim (2019) pursued this possibility and claimed that the two constructions are derived from distinct movement processes: Kes-construction from movement to clause-external topic and focus projections, and Ki-construction from movement to clause-internal topic and focus projections. In doing so, they claimed the existence of clause-internal topic and focus projections in Korean, independently of the clause-external topic and focus projections often posited in the analysis of Kes-construction in the literature. This paper closely examines the morphosyntactic and semantic properties of the two constructions and critically reviews Park and Kims claim. Providing a variety of empirical evidence, this paper refutes Park and Kims claim and shows that Ki-construction is not involved with any movement regarding topic and focus information structure and the topic information in Ki-construction is simply base-generated.

# Kes-construction # Ki-construction # cleft # topic # focus # information structure # base-generation

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