A Predicate Inversion Analysis of Kukes in Korean "Sluicing"

There has been a great amount of work regarding the identity of “sluicing” in Korean. Two major claims are the (pseudo)cleft analysis and the movement-cum-deletion analysis. The former claims the Korean “sluicing” is derived from a kind of cleft clause, while the latter claims it is derived in terms of movement and the subsequent deletion of the remnant clause. This paper is a piece of support to the cleft (or pseudocleft) analysis of Korean “sluicing” in contrast to the movement-cum-deletion analysis. Differently from the previous analyses, however, this paper claims that the optional presence of kukes in “sluicing” is actually an argument in Spec-TP, which has originated as the predicate of the embedded small clause. This is in line with the predicate inversion analysis of English pseudoclefts (Moro 1997, den Dikken 2008). The proposed analysis turns out to be effective in explaining the connectivity in “sluicing” in the same way as clefts in Korean.