Tense and honorific interpretations in Korean gapping construction: A constraint- and construction-based approach

Abstract

Chung (2001) claims that non-final conjuncts without overt tense morphemes which produce asymmetric tense interpretations are to be analyzed as TP; and Lee (2005) argues that the verbal honorific affix -si- never occurs in non-final conjuncts so honorific agreement between the subject and the verb takes place in the final conjunct only and thus the Korean gapping constructions should be analyzed as vP coordination. However, these two previous analyses seem to fail to make the generalizations on the distributional behaviors of gapping constructions, facing theoretical and empirical difficulties. To solve the problems they face, we claim that verbal gapping in Korean is allowed to occur in all non-final conjuncts when the covert predicates of the non-final conjuncts have an identical semantic relation value with that of the overt verb in the final conjunct, regardless of the consistency of the honorific and tense values between conjuncts.