In many languages, verb phrases may undergo movement to a sentence initial position. In Korean, the object along with the verb undergoes preposing leaving the subject as a remnant while the subject along with the verb cannot undergo preposing leaving the object as a remnant. In the latter, an unbound trace is inside the preposed constituent and the Proper Binding Condition (PBC) is violated. The subject-object asymmetry shows a non-trivial implication for the structure of VP/vP. This squib investigates VP preposing in various types of multiple accusative constructions (MACs) in Korean and aims to shed light on its structure. The previous analyses of MAC can be classified into a constituent analysis and a non-constituent analysis. The former assumes that the two accusative nominals form a constituent in the underlying structure while the latter assumes that they are not. This squib attempts to show which analysis can account for the (im)possibility of VP preposing in each sub-type of MACs. We suggest that ill-formed examples in some sub-types of MACs are related to the PBC violation, which supports the constituent analysis of the construction. We further discuss a different group of MACs which can be treated as a non-constituent analysis.
1. Introduction
2. VP Preposing in Multiple Accusative Constructions
3. Topic-type Multiple Accusative Constructions
4. Concluding Remarks
References