Negative Wh-constructions in Korean: A Discourse-based Approach

This paper concerns so-called negative wh-questions (NWHCs) in Korean in which a limited set of wh-words is used to express the speaker’s negative attitude (e.g., disapproval) toward the previous utterance. The construction displays quite idiosyncratic properties, which are not observed in either interrogative wh-questions or rhetorical wh-questions. This paper offers a discourse-based analysis, arguing that NWHCs are treated as a special type of rhetorical question, rather than as interrogative wh-questions (Cheung 2008, 2009). Specifically, it is suggested that NWH-words function to grammatically mark polar questions they modify as rhetorical questions by asserting the reverse polarity of the salient proposition evoked from the previous utterance. This direction, formalized in the framework of HPSG, allows us to account for the unique distributional and semantic properties of Korean NWHCs.