Ellipsis, Identity, and the Syntax of Verb Echo Answers in Korean

This paper argues that Korean Verb Echo Answers (VEAs) are derived by movement of a verbal phrase (vP) followed by clausal (TP) ellipsis, rather than by pro-drop. I adopt a hybrid identity condition on ellipsis: syntactic identity constrains the structural spine, while focus-marked material (e.g., polarity/NPIs) is exempt; the remaining propositional skeleton must be semantically recoverable: (1) coordination diagnostics in which the remnant patterns as a phrase rather than a head, indicating phrasal movement involved in the derivation; (2) argu- ment-structure matching, where mismatches in transitivity, voice, applicative, causative, and related verbal features are disallowed, showing that structurally encoded information cannot be ignored for ellipsis licensing;(3)idiom preservation, where verb-object idioms retain their idio- matic interpretation, pointing to a constituent that contains the verb and its internal argument and cannot be recovered by pro-drop;(4)locality, where VEAs are clause- bounded in a manner expected under ellipsis but unexpected under pro-drop. The current analysis further predicts that (i) island effects (ii) NPI/polarity alternations are licit because focus-marked material is ignored in identity checking, and (iii) subjects systematically take scope over negation via reconstruction at LF (cf. Huang 1987). This work contributes to the theory of ellipsis by delimiting which mismatches are licensed by the identity condition and which are not.It further strengthens the predicate-fragment literature by establishing Korean VEAs as genuine ellipsis while offering diagnostics that are incompatible with pro-drop.