Why only Predicate-final in Embedded Clauses in Korean?

This paper attempts to account for the fact that only predicate-final word order is allowed in embedded clauses in Korean, a curious fact in that free word order variation is observed in simple sentences. This asymmetry requires a comparison between the SOV hypothesis widely accepted so far and the SVO hypothesis newly argued for to be fairly made. The core of the proposed analysis in this paper is that under the SVO hypothesis, the whole clausal complement moves to its Spec, namely, Spec CP, to be embedded by the Comp -ko, a movement which is ultimately attributed to the Principle of Locality of Selection (Sportiche 1998). This paper further shows that the SOV hypothesis cannot make the desirable predictions on some range of empirical data, thereby eventually arguing that the SVO hypothesis is to be preferred over the SOV hypothesis in Korean. The current core analysis is finally shown to yield some desirable consequences in two empirical domains: NPI licensing and anaphor binding in Korean.