VP-ellipsis in Right-dislocated Constructions

Whether VP-ellipsis exists or not in Korean has been a controversial issue. In this paper, I consider a new fact from one construction involving a right-dislocated relative clause in an attempt to argue for its existence in this language. The success of this argument is significant in that other alternative approaches such as NP-ellipsis or pro replacement popular in most of the existing literature are bound to be weakened that much. It is also seen that the current argument requires the head-initial hypothesis for the structure building in Korean, invalidating the traditional, yet unverified, head-final hypothesis. This is confirmed by showing that other approaches such as NP-ellipsis and pro replacement cannot properly deal with the VP-ellipsis in the right-dislocated construction in question under the head-final structure. In particular, it is argued that this right-dislocated construction is more properly analyzed under the head-first mono-clausal approach than under the conventional head-final bi-clausal approach.