An Empirical Investigation of Case-drop in Korean Why-stripping

An Empirical Investigation of Case-drop in Korean Why-stripping

This study employs an experimental method to examine whether the acceptability of why-stripping, which is an elliptical variant of full why-questions, is influenced by the case-marker drop of the non-wh-remnant and whether there is a difference in acceptability ratings between dative case-drop and accusative case-drop in Korean. Based on the experimental findings, we argue that Korean why-stripping favors case-marked non-wh-remnants over case-less non-wh-remnants in that case-marking facilitates a remnant to be linked to its correlate in the antecedent clause. We also argue that dative-less why-stripping is less acceptable than accusative-less why-stripping in that the dative case-marker eykey in Korean is semantic, compared with the accusative case-marker (l)ul, which is grammatical (cf. Kim 2015). In sum, we propose that Korean why-stripping is better explained by a hybrid (i.e., grammar-plus-processing) approach.