String Vacuous Scrambling and Specificity

String Vacuous Scrambling and Specificity

This paper examines Korean (and Japanese) wh-phrases in the context of negative questions, which yields only a specific interpretation (in terms of Enc 1991). Superficially there are two ways of marking specificity, one overt wh-scrambling and the other stress assignment. By reducing stress assignment into a syntactic form of movement, this paper claims that the two seemingly different strategies are merely mnemonic, the difference only being the matter of whether movement is visible or invisible to PF, termed as visible scrambling and invisible (string vacuous) scrambling, respectively. The existence of string vacuous scrambling is supported by three pieces of evidence, (i) relative position of wh-phrases to Negative Polarity Items, (ii) blocking effects onthe negative focus interpretation, and (iii) scope interactions. This analysis correctly captures not only the varying interpretations of the wh-NPs with respect to specificity in Korean (and Japanese) but it also resolves some conflicts found in the reading of postverbal structures in Mandarin Chinese. By contending that specifics and nonspecifics are mapped onto the areas external and internal to VP, respectively, this study lends a significant support for Diesing's (1992) Mapping Hypothesis.