The Cartography of RCs in Korean & Japanese: A Comparative-syntactic Approach

Abstract

This paper shows that the difference in the structure of relative clauses (RCs) in Korean and Japanese determines the availability of say-omission/contraction in these two languages. Specifically, in addition to providing a novel observation about say-omission/contraction in Korean and Japanese, we argue that this phenomenon is attributed to the presence of a CP layer in RCs in Korean (Yoon 1990, Han 1992 among many others), but to the lack thereof in Japanese (Saito 1985; Murasugi 1991; Taguchi 2008; Miyagawa 2011; among many others). We argue that RC-internal say-omission/contraction in Korean is an instance of TP-ellipsis. We adopt the theory of ellipsis in Bošković (2014), where deletion can target phases or the complements of phasal heads. Thus, the subject, the object, and the complement clause of say within the RCs of Korean are moved out of and survive an elison of TP (i.e., the complement of the phasal head C) because of the presence of the CP-domain providing a landing site, whereas in Japanese such an option is not available.