Notes on Fragments with Tag Questions in English and Korean

This squib focuses on fragments with tag questions in English and Korean. Barros & Craenenbroeck (2013) explores tag questions in fragment constructions in English. They observe that when the host is a fragment answer, the tag question consistent with an isomorphic ellipsis site is degraded and the cleft tag question is preferred. The preference for the cleft tag question poses a challenge for Merchant s (2001, 2004) non-cleft ellipsis analysis of fragments. They suggest that tag questions can be used as a window into the internal syntactic structure of clausal ellipsis sites and that cleft structure is default clausal source of fragmentary utterance. In this squib, we explore interaction between tags and fragment answers in Korean. Nominal fragments in Korean are classified as case-marked ones and caseless ones. Ahn & Cho (2017a, b, c) suggest that case-marked fragments are derived from full clauses and that caseless fragments are derived from copula clauses. On this view, the latter is predicted to occur with a copula tag question while the former is predicted to occur with a regular tag question. We show that the phenomenon in Korean is a non-trivial empirical argument for Barros & Craenenbroeck s claim that the well-formedness of specific types of tag questions in fragment constructions is used as a window into the internal syntactic structure of clausal ellipsis sites.