| The main goal of this thesis is to contribute towards our understanding of the interaction between the lexical component and syntax that is manifested in Complex Predicates (e.g. Serial Verb Constructions, V-V Compounds, Light Verb Constructions, Psych Verb constructions, Modal Verb Construction, Negation, etc.) of Japanese, Korea, and other languages with the focus on vP hypothesis, and its relation to syntactic constructions in the grammar.; By examining the linking (theta-identification) problems in Korean SVC through Thematic Hierarchy and Head-feature percolation, this thesis suggests Korean and Japanese lexical compounds maintain the double head structure in the argument structure of the compound verbs in favor of Li (1993). In keeping with the spirit of Minimalist Program and Distributed Morphology, this study provides a unified syntactic structure for the Complex Predicates under the assumption of morphological realization (Spell-Out) of small nu head of nuP, suggesting that nu is not just theory-internally motivated and ha is the case of the morphophonetic and semantic justification of nu in nuP structure in Korean. From the multi-morphemic view on Japanese Negation (Jung 2001), I propose that the /ani/ of Korean post-verbal negation, /ci ani-ha/, is not just one of the free variation of Negation, but it is the combination of Negation and Copula, /an-i/ with the conclusion that Korean Post-verbal Negation form constitutes a complex predicate structure as /Nominalizer Negation-Copula-light verb (nu)/. |
