한국어 절-비교구문의 관계절 분석에 대한 반론

This paper argues that Korean has genuine clausal comparatives which involve degree operator movement. Kim and Sells (2010) contends that Korean has no clausal comparatives, and that apparent Korean clausal comparatives are in fact phrasal comparatives, which can be analyzed as having relative clause structure (i.e. a relative clause analysis, See Sudo (2015) for a similar analysis of Japanese clausal comparatives.). This paper demonstrates that the relative clause analysis like Kim and Sells (2010) and Sudo (2015) is not sufficient for explaining Korean clausal comparatives. A variety of novel evidence is addressed, coming from the grammaticality of clausal comparatives that must refer to human nouns, the absence of internally-headed relative clauses in comparative context, the availability of singular or plural postpositional phrases combined with pota than , negative island effects, and scope ambiguities. This discussion leads to the conclusion that Korean comparatives allow semantic interpretation of 2-place -er (i.e. degree comparison), along with 3-place -er (i.e. individual comparison) for phrasal comparatives, which, in turn, implies that the parametric variation account suggested by Beck et al. (2004) is too strong for Korean comparatives.