Korean (and Japanese) Morphology from a Syntactic Perspective

This article concentrates on Sells's (1995) arguments against the syntactic view that words are built in the syntax, and it develops a syntactic account that yields a parsimonious account of the properties of "morphological units." Inflected words in Korean (and Japanese) are derived syntactically from head-initial structures by phrasal movement. Properties of words follow from regular syntactic principles and phonological properties of affixes. Agreement can be triggered under piedpiping. Word structure interacts with scope (Lee 2004, 2005), arguing for the presence of case affixes in the narrow syntax.