Different in conjunctives, comitatives, and comparatives

This paper examines aspects of the relational adjective talu ‘different’, which has not been investigated systematically in the generative literature on Korean. One of the most interesting properties of talu is the occurrence of a wa-phrase, which has the potential to be used in three different ways, i.e., as a conjunctive, a comitative, or a comparative phrase. An important observation is made to the effect that the three different uses of the wa-phrase correlate with different interpretations of talu. Based on this, a novel analysis of sentences involving talu is proposed, accounting for their interpretative patterns. The gist of the analysis is that in sentences involving talu, a wa-phrase, which denotes the standard of comparison, is located in the Spec position of a functional projection, call it, FP, which mediates the relation between the wa-phrase and talu. It is proposed that SpecFP can undergo deletion, where different amounts of deletion of SpecFP, i.e., full deletion and partial deletion à la Charnavel 2015, lead to different surface forms and interpretations of the constructions involving talu. Crucially, the internal-external distinction of the interpretation of talu is argued to correlate with the presence or absence of an overtly realized wa-phrase denoting the standard of comparison, which is determined by deletion.