Parametric Variation on Missing Tenses in Temporal Adjuncts

Abstract

The past tense markers cannot appear in the temporal adjuncts of Korean, while they can in those of English. This fact is surprising since it has been argued in the literatures that the so called SOT rule, which deletes past tense at LF, applies to English but not to Korean. I argue in the paper that, interestingly, the missing Tense variation in temporal adjuncts can be captured exactly by the solution for the SOT variation, i.e., Stowell’s (2005) claim that English morphological past –ed is a non-local PAST polarity item (PPI) but Japanese one (and Korean –ess, too, I claim) is a local PPI. The true semantic PAST tense, as a polarity licenser for a morphological past, cannot occur within the temporal adjuncts since its PRO reference time argument cannot be controlled due to the intervening temporal argument. This leads to the result that local PPIs, which need to be licensed by the true semantic PAST within temporal adjuncts, cannot appear in temporal adjuncts. On the other hand, non-local PPIs can appear in temporal adjuncts since they can be licensed by the true semantic PAST outside the temporal adjuncts.