On Caseless Fragments and Some Implications

Abstract

A great deal of attention has been paid to two types of fragments in Korean: case-marked and caseless fragments. We suggest that case-marked and caseless fragments all involve remnant movement to a focus position prior to TP deletion. We further claim that their clausal sources are different. We propose that caseless fragments are derived from reduced copula sentences unlike case-marked fragments. Under the analysis advanced here, parallel behaviors of two types of fragments are explained as a consequence of movement and TP deletion. Non-parallel behaviors, on the other hand, are explained as a consequence of different clausal sources. In this paper, we further observe similarities and differences between the two types of fragments concerning distribution of adverbials and idiomatic interpretation. Further implications of our proposal are discussed concerning several less-noticed phenomena related to polarity and tense mismatching which are not properly analyzed in the previous literature.