Word Order and Its Variations in Korean: A TAGs Approach

Abstract

It is generally required that a grammar formalism explain the word-order variation since such the variation is universal phenomenon of all natural languages and that the complex patterns cannot be realized by reodering the terminals. This phenomenon is especially important to nonconfigurational languages that are relatively free in word order. We show how TAG can handle the word -order and its variation in Korean. We derive a new property called Scramble-α innated in scrambling. The domain of scrambling can be realized within the elementary trees of TAG and can be localized under TAG formalism. We propose a new adjoining constraint suitable for the description of word order of Korean. We show that TAG generates the syntactic structures as well as ordering precedence at the same time. We also show that long-distance scrambling is another type of cross-serial dependencies and analyzed with the same principle that local scrambling uses in TAG.