Nanosyntactical Approach to Korean Negations

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explain Korean negations using the nanosyntactical method, in which even lexical items can be explained by the syntactically designed tree diagram. Unlike this approach, in DM the lexically related alternations are considered exceptions beyond syntactic boundary. According to Chung (2007) following DM framework, short-form negations must be an adverbial element located under the syntactic node, NegP. He maintains that the adverbial aspect of short-form negation grammatically allows short-form negations to appear in the sentence with NIPs element. Also, in the same research, ‘molu- (do not know)’ is counted as a lexically inserted expression resulted from the combination of two inter-fractions like ‘not’ and ‘know’. In this paper we will reanalyze the logical explanations more in detail. And, the nanosyntactical approach with the redesigned syntactic structure comprised of the nodes such as TNeg, FocNeg, ClassNeg and QNeg will be applied to refute the viewpoints. Thus, the properties of short-form negations and other negative prefixes can be accounted for more successively by arranging them under the disparate nodes like Q2Neg and Q1Neg respectively.