This paper attempts to deal with a new range of verb repetition constructions in Korean that have not seriously discussed so far in the literature, which I dub Verb Repetition Construction IV. Revealing syntactic properties of this construction, this paper proves that the verb repetition in this construction can best be explained by the copy theory of movement suggested in the Minimalist Framework (Chomsky 1993, Nunes 2004). Arguing for the single clausehood of the construction at issue, this paper also tries to establish its structure. In doing so, two hypotheses, namely, SOV and SVO, are considered to see if which one can produce the surface word order of the construction in question more efficiently. The results obtained through the discussion rather surprisingly opt for the SVO hypothesis, forcing us to believe that Korean may be underlyingly SVO. Once this result is accepted, some consequences naturally follow. Terminals nodes in the structure are now linearized in the surface strictly according to the LCA defined in terms of asymmetric c-command (Kayne 1994). This thus helps construct a more restrictive theory of phrase structure.
(0)
(0)