명사구 내 보충어에 의 격 표지 부재와 인접에 의한 가시성 조건 만족

Absence of Case Marker in the Complement Position of the Noun Head and Satisfaction of Visibility Condition by Adjacency.

In Korean, there are two types of nominals dependent on the noun head: the nominals combined with the so-called genetive case marker uy and the nominals without this marker. We assume, following Hong (2010, 2013) and An (2012), that uy is not a case marker, but a modifier marker. So a nominal with uy is not an argument, but a modifier. On the other hand, we claim that the nominals of the other type, nominals without uy, are complement arguments; they are noun phrases; they have only a particular Θ-role, theme if their Θ-assigner is an event noun; they always appear adjacent to the noun head on which they depend. However, we have to say that the nominals without uy don’t receive any Case because they don’t have any morphological case on them. Then, the question arises as to how they come to satisfy the Visibility Condition, which requires that arguments be Case-assigned for Θ -marking. To answer this question, we propose that the Visibility Condition should be revised so that it can be satisfied not only by Case assignment but also by adjacency. Recall that the nominals without uy always appear adjacent to their Θ-marker. Therefore, these Caseless arguments can satisfy the Visibility Condition by means of adjacency. We also show that this revised Visibility Condition correctly predicts absence of arguments in the Spec position of the noun head, and obligatory presence of a case marker on sentential subjects, on ECMed arguments, and on subjects of resultative small clauses.