The Architecture of Right Dislocation Constructions

The R(ight) D(islocation) is attested in strictly head-final languages like K(orean) and J(apanese). The traditional idea about Right Dislocation in K/J was that it is another manifestation of free word order (i.e., scrambling) and should be analyzed as being derived by rightward movement (H-S Choe 1988; Simon 1989). However, recent analyses of RD favor positing a bi-clausal source for the construction where the second clause involves movement followed by deletion (Tanaka 2001; Chung 2008). In this paper we argue that there is no movement in RD constructions. In particular, we do not generate the Appendix by movement. Instead, the Appendix locally licenses a null predicate that is coindexed with a corresponding predicate in the Host clause. What enables the Appendix to license a null predicate of the right type are the case-markers (dependent-markers, more generally, following Y-J Choi 2007) which play a ‘constructive’ role (Nordlinger 1998) in structure- building in dependent-marking languages like K/J.