Left-to-Right Asymmetry and Early Association in Korean

Abstract

AbstractThis paper shows Korean speakers’ strong preference for incremental structure building based on the following core phenomena: (1) left–right asymmetry; (2) pre-verbal structure building and a strong preference for early association. This paper argues that these phenomena reflect the procedural aspects of linguistic competence, which are difficult to explain within non-procedural grammar formalisms. Based on these observations, I argue for the necessity of a grammar formalism that adopts left-to-right incrementality as a core property of the syntactic architecture. In particular, I aim to show the role of (1) constructive particles; (2) prosody; and (3) structural routines in incremental Korean structure building. Though the nature of this discussion is theory-neutral, in order to formalise this idea I will adopt Dynamic Syntax [DS: Kempson et al. (Dynamic syntax: the flow of language understanding, Blackwell, Oxford, 2001); Cann et al. (The dynamics of language. Elsevier, Oxford, 2005)] in this paper.