The Negative Morpheme mal- as an Inherently Negative Predicate

Assuming that negative commands or requests are expressed in Korean by employing the negative morpheme mal-, not by employing one of the varieties of Neg found in declaratives, Han and Lee (2007) propose a morpho-syntactic analysis of mal-imperatives. This analysis suggests (i) that the morpheme mal- is an allomorphic variant of the string ani-ha- (’Neg-do’; long-form (LF) negation), which appears in the context of the deontic modality that is triggered in imperatives and in certain limited sentence contexts, and (ii) that it appears only in deontic contexts. In this paper, I reject (i-ii) to suggest the following. First, contrary to (i), the morpheme mal- has the meaning of the volitional verb refrain, which exhibits a certain selectional property, requiring an animate subject. Furthermore, it does not behave like LF negation (Neg) in interrogatives. Second, it can easily appear in many non-deontic contexts, contrary to (ii), which may lead to the suspicion that deontic modality is not syntactically involved in imperatives. It has been noted that mal- can be involved in NPI-licensing and in scope ambiguity, like Neg (see Lee 1977, 1978), which can be considered evidence in favor of suggestion (i). However, I argue that it exhibits these two Neg-like properties, simply because it is an inherently negative predicate in the sense of Klima (1964). Suggestion (i) implies that negative imperatives in Korean have the form mal-imperative, but the present discussion suggests that both negative imperatives with LF negation and mal-imperatives are allowed in principle in Korean because mal- and LF negation need not be in complementary distribution, which seems to be empirically supported.