Intervention Constraint and Licensing of Negative Polarity Items

초록

This paper revisits the Generalized Immediate Scope Constraint (GISC) (Sells and Kim 2006) in Korean, which has been known as one of the Negative Polarity Item (NPI) licensing constraints holding at LF, and argues that the GISC needs to be restated as a more general Intervention Constraint strictly holding at S-structure. This line of reasoning will be supported by the fact that licensing of Korean NPIs is not constrained by the scope relation between an NPI and its licenser as the GISC defines, but rather constrained by the surface word order between them. The restrictions on the multiple occurrences of an NPI will be given as a theoretical consequence brought by the application of the Intervention Constraint.

키워드