Suwon Yoon

• Ph.D. University of Chicago
• Professor (Full) at University of Seoul

The goal of this paper is to provide an analysis of two important aspects of conditional clauses in Korean. The first goal is to reveal the structure of the conditional clause. In investigating reduced conditionals and regular copula clausal conditionals, we suggest the right-periphery of conditional clauses based on the Split CP hypothesis ( Rizzi...

In this paper, we study patterns of polarity items in comparatives, including data from Greek, English, Korean, and Dutch described in Jack Hoeksema’s work. Our conclusions challenge the status of the comparative as a licensing environment for negative polarity items (NPIs). NPIs that appear in the comparative are not licensed but rescued in the se...

The goal of this study is to propose a pragmatic analysis of what we call Emotive Taste Terms (ETTs) in Korean, compared to English. What makes Korean taste adjectives special is its multidimensional meaning: In descriptive dimension, (i) the literal meaning concerns the taste; or (ii) it can be extended toward the situation, yielding a figurative...

The goal of the present study is to identify a novel paradigm of epistemic modal operator derived from disjunction . Our main data involves an inquisitive disjunction marker nka in Korean, the presence of which enhances a speaker’s epistemic uncertainty and forms a modalized question. We show how nka contributes the modal effects in question within...

In this study, we aim to propose the Pragmatics and Semantics of what we term the emotive color terms (ECTs) in Korean as a subcase of expressive elements, analyzed as Conventional Implicature (Potts in The logic of conventional implicature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005 et seq.). In exploring extremely complex connotational nuances in 77 v...

The main goal of this paper is to reevaluate the Compatibility Condition on the polarity/degree of emotional attitude for multiple expressive elements including slurs, epithets, anti-honorifics, intensifiers, and mitigators in Korean. The project provides new results obtained from a big data-based trend analysis including usages in Twitter, news ar...

The current analysis has important consequences: First, this study has empirical confirmation that the types of MCP-trigger must be extended to comprise the newly identified cases in Korean. Second, the structural ambiguity for MCP constructions in Korean gives us the generalization that MCP operate on syntax, even though they are semantically or p...

This article discusses in detail two cases of even-marked negative polarity items (NPIs) in Greek and Korean that are not scalar or exhaustive. This prima facie paradoxical finding suggests that even-marking is not always an indicator of scalarity—and, at least in the case of the Korean and Greek NPIs discussed, even is grammaticalized as a nonscal...

The main goal of this paper is to propose a novel paradigm of the split epistemic ignorance, based on two morphologically related particles in Korean: inka in wh-indefinites vs. nka in modalized questions. Previous literature assumes the interrogative-indefinite affinity as a reflex of a semantic relationship between interrogative markers and indef...

To appear. Language. This paper discusses two cases of EVEN-marked negative polarity items (NPIs) in Greek and Korean that are NOT scalar or exhaustive. We propose that these non-scalar NPIs are anti-specific indefinites with REFERENTIAL VAGUENESS.

In this paper, we caution that the comparative is, in fact, not, a licensing environment for NPIs. We show that the appearance of NPIs is much more restricted than previously assumed: strong NPIs do not appear in comparatives, and often NPI-any is confused with free choice any. Strong NPIs are licensed only if an antiveridical function is introduce...

The main claim of this paper is that a general theory of what has been called “expletive” negation in subordinate clauses should allow for the possibility of it occurring without being licensed by negative predicates, and more crucially that, contrary to the traditional term “expletive”, this type of negation is not semantically void. Thus I propos...

While the semantic approaches differ on whether there is a negative operator (¬: Jespersen, 1917; Ross, 1969; McConnell-Ginet, 1973; Seuren, 1973; Klein, 1980; Stassen, 1984; Larson, 1988) or a non-negative inequality operator (>: Von Stechow, 1984; Rullmann, 1995; Kennedy, 1997a; Beck et al., 2004) in the comparative, various issues remain unresol...

This paper documents a previously unnoted structural asymmetry among wh-phrases with respect to intervention effects. I show in a series of experiments (phonetic and syntactic) that in Korean (and potentially in Japanese and Turkish), only wh-phrases that are base generated in a structurally low position trigger intervention effects while wh-phrase...

The primary goal of the present study is to gain more insight into the phenomena of Expletive Negation. Contrary to what the traditional term “expletive negation” would make us believe, I propose an analysis of this particular type of negation as having semantic content that consists in two components: First, “expletive negation” is subject to lice...

This book explores the interaction of grammatical components in a wide variety of languages, and presents and exemplifies new experimental and analytic techniques for studying linguistic interfaces. Speaking a language requires access to the different aspects of its grammar - semantic, syntactic, phonological, pragmatic, morphological, and phonetic...

In this paper, we present a striking parallel between Greek and Korean in the formation and interpretation of metalinguistic comparatives. The initial observation is that both languages show an empirical contrast between ordinary and metalinguistic comparatives realized in two places: (a) in the form of a designated metalinguistic comparative MORE,...

In this paper, we propose an analysis of metalinguistic comparatives (MCs) in Greek and Korean which combines an attitudinal semantics (Giannakidou and Stavrou 2008) with an expressive component. The comparative morpheme supplies the former, and the than-particle supplies the latter. Following Giannakidou and Stavrou, we assume that the MC involves...

Contra previous uniform approaches for wh-phrases, the current paper argues that there is a clear asymmetry between in-situ argument and adjunct wh-phrases with respect to Intervention Effects (IEs) in Korean and Japanese. Based on the categorical (nominal vs. adverbial) dichotomy evidenced by structural case attachment tests and formation of compl...