Restructuring Infinitives in Korean

This paper argues that Wurmbrand’s (1998) analysis of restructuring infinitives is on the right track. Her analysis denies the implicit assumption that all infinitives have the same syntactic structure, CP/TP. The auxiliary verb construction in Korean has an infinitival complement which behaves as if it lacks clausal nodes; they allow NP licensing and honorification both of which cannot hold if there is a clausal boundary in between. Furthermore, this transparency effect is correlated with the absence of tense morphemes and complementizer in the auxiliary verb construction. However, unlike Wurmbrand’s assumption that restructuring infinitives are bare-VP, we argue that the infinitive complement of the auxiliary verb construction in Korean is vP on the basis of case alternations and the imperfect control.