A Bi-clausal Analysis of Multiple Fragments

This paper focuses on multiple fragments in Korean. In the research, it is a non-trivial question to be answered why a string final fragment in the multiple fragments can be caseless or show postposition drop. The previous approaches to multiple fragments are divided into two groups: mono-clausal analysis and bi-clausal analysis. In this paper, we show that multiple fragments are well accounted for under bi-clausal analysis. More specifically, we suggest that case-marked and caseless fragments have different sentential connection and that multiple fragments are derived via repetitive gapless right dislocation plus ellipsis of the host clause. We show that the word order effect on case marker drop or postposition drop is due to the core property of the right dislocation construction in Korean, advanced in Ahn and Cho (2016). We argue that the restriction on multiple fragments, put forward in Ahn (2012) and Park (2013), is explained as a result of syntactic and semantic completeness of the host clause. We further discuss in depth the differences lying in the proposals of Park & Kim (2015), An (2016), and ours.