Bare Fragment Answers as Elliptical Pseudoclefts

The paper attempts to provide a syntactic analysis of fragment answers without case markers in Korean. These bare fragment nominals frequently occur as answers corresponding to wh-words in question in informal daily conversations. Given the propositional semantics and observance of the Binding Theory, this paper argues that a bare fragment answer is derivable from a full-fledged sentence, not a canonical sentence correlate but a pseudocleft one. Bare fragment answers are successfully derivable from the proposed pseudocleft structure which has the topic phrase elided, the informal copula ya phonetically null, and the pre-copula position filled with the focused NP that turns out to be a bare FA.