Verum Beyond Focus: Comparing VP-Preposing in Korean and English

This study investigates the verum effect in Korean Nominalized Verb Phrase (NVP) preposing and its parallel to English VP-preposing (VPP). NVPs are Korean verb phrases nominalized with suffixes such as -ki or -(u)m, which retain verbal properties internally but function syntactically as noun phrases. While English VPP has been widely studied, its Korean counterpart remains underexplored. I argue that only the hata type construction in Korean shows genuine VP displacement. In this construction, the main verb hata (‘do’) acts as a lexical verum operator, emphasizing the speaker’s epistemic commitment to the truth of a proposition. This discourse function parallels English VPP. In line with Gutzmann et al.’s (2020) Lexical Operator Thesis (LOT), the analysis draws a clear distinction between verum and focus, demonstrating that they are independent phenomena. By comparing Korean and English data, the paper refines our understanding of verum-focus interaction and contributes to broader discussions on the syntax-discourse interface.