Verb Movement and Structure of IP in Korean

Abstract

In the recent proposals of Pollock (1989) and Chomsky (1989), the structure of IP becomes more articulated, each feature of INFL, namely, AGR and Tense being analyzed as the syntactic head of a maximal projection. In these analyses, inflectional morphology is explained in terms of verb movement in syntax. In this paper, we propose a more articulated structure of IP in Korean which shows rich verbal morphology. Specifically, we show that Korean provides us with strong evidence that each maximal projection proposed in the previous analyses without any argument for its status as a maximal projection really is a maximal projection which can act as an independent syntactic unit. In addition, we show how the inflectional morphology in Korean can be explained in terms of Verb movement in syntax.