Speaker
Professor Duk-Ho AN
Konkuk University
Professor Duk-Ho An received his PhD degree at the University of Connecticut in 2007, whose dissertation explores core issues of the syntax-phonology interface. He is now a professor in linguistics at Konkuk University, Seoul. Professor An’s research specializes in comparative syntax, focusing on clausal and nominal structures in Korean. His work has been published in prestigious journals, such as Journal of East Asian Linguistics, Linguistic Inquiry, Linguistics and Studia Linguistica. Professor An also actively contribute to the academic community, organizing well-known conferences, such as the 12th Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) in Asia and the 21st Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar (SICOGG).

Event Details
Taking Chung’s (2001, 2005) discussion as a point of departure, I discuss the phenomenon of tenseless clausal coordination in Korean. I investigate the phenomenon from a broader perspective concerning the system of tense marking and temporal interpretation of the language. Showing that there are many environments where a null tense marker is used in Korean, I suggest that the null tense marker is the default realization of the tense head for both past and non-past tenses in the language. To capture the allomorphic alternation between overt and null tense markers, I propose two postsyntactic insertion rules for past and non-past tenses. Concerning how the tense head bears past or non-past specification in the first place, I adopt Stowell’s (1982, 1996, 2007) analysis and reformulate it in terms of Agree relations involving the categories C, T, and Z and their tense features, the result of which feeds the aforementioned insertion rules. Based on this, I argue that tenseless clausal coordination involves a multiple feature-valuing configuration under TP-coordination. The current analysis not only explains tenseless clausal coordination in a way that is not construction-specific, but it also provides a novel account of the system of morphological tense marking in Korean. It is also suggested, albeit tentatively, that phases and spell-out domains may be relevant to determining how tense is morphologically marked. The current analysis is in line with the cartographic approach to clause structure—especially, that the traditional CP consists of a series of functional projections (Cinque 1996, 2006, Rizzi 1997).

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lin@cuhk.edu.hk