Topics in the syntax of East Asian languages: Long-distance anaphora and adverbial case (Korean, Chinese, Japanese)

This dissertation aims at giving a unified account of long-distance anaphora in Korean, Chinese, and Japanese, and providing a principled account of structural Case on adverbial DPs in Korean in the Minimalist framework.; Considering that the LD reflexives in these Asian languages behave differently from those in such European languages as Italian and Icelandic, Chapter 2 discusses LD anaphora in these Asian languages, taking Cole & Sung's (1994) Head Movement Analysis. Chapter 3 discusses this topic in the Minimalist framework, positing the feature [Refl] for LD reflexives and the functional category T.; I show that LD anaphora in these Asian languages has to do with whether the LD reflexives have inherent &phis;-features. I show that weak subject orientation for the Korean LD reflexives and strong subject orientation for the Chinese and Japanese counterparts follow from the account of Subject Orientation, whose Condition (C) excludes an object from being an antecedent for the Chinese and Japanese LD anaphors with no inherent &phis;-features. I prove that the blocking effect for Chinese ziji follows from LF Spec-head agreement, that the absence of the blocking effect for zibun follows from optional agreement for Japanese, and that the absence of the blocking effect for the Korean LD anaphors is due to their inherent &phis;-features.; The gist of the analysis of Adverbial Case in Korean is that the duration adverbial gets its Accusative feature checked by Aspect and that the frequency adverbial gets its Accusative or Nominative feature checked off by v or T. This explains why the frequency adverbial shows the same Case as the verbal object, and why the duration adverbial behaves differently from the frequency adverbial and the verbal object.; I argue that no Aspect exists for the stative/psych verbs, that unergative verbs are verbs with capacity to license Accusative Case, and that no light verb exists for unaccusative verbs with no capacity to license Accusative Case.; In case Aspect for the embedded VP has a value [0 complete] in the siph-ta construction, the durative, the frequency adverbial, and the verbal object have their Nominative features checked by the matrix T.