Abstract
This chapter summarizes the main findings and claims made in this book and discusses their implications for the syntax and semantics of N modifiers and the theory of Universal Grammar. It also shows how the proposed analysis enhances our understanding of what role each type of N modifier may play in an article-less, prenominal modifier, and classifier language. We will see that while Korean-type languages and English-type ones differ from each other, at the macro-level, they are more similar than dissimilar in that, in both types of languages, N modifiers occur in the order of ‘Identificational > Speaker-oriented’. Given this and other findings reported in this book, we conclude that it is possible to capture cross-linguistic variation on N modifiers by assuming a universal DP structure if one is cognizant of the fact that surface syntax is influenced by discourse structure and prosody, which in turn reflects the way humans package and process information using language.
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Notes
- 1.
About ku in Korean, some authors have noted that it performs an intensifier-like function when occurring as a part of an adverb kurehkey ‘in that way’ or ‘so’ (e.g., Suh 2002) and others have remarked that it may carry a mirative meaning (e.g. Kang 2018) , but no previous work has articulated its affective use in the way I have done here, looking at the same kind of linguistic phenomenon.
- 2.
In (6), A’s utterance would not be met by B’s puzzled response if it contains han-kay; a ‘NUM + CL’ cluster encodes indefiniteness in Korean , as mentioned above, so if her utterance contains han-kay, then she would be understood as introducing a new discourse referent.
- 3.
Given this conclusion, the decompositional OT-based analysis proposed here may shed new light on so-called discourse-configurational languages such as Warlpiri, Passamaquoddy, and Kiowa, which are well known for their (apparently) fluid surface constituent orders in the clausal domain. For discussion and data, see, a.o., Legate 2001, Bruening 2001, and Adger et al. 2011.
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Kim, MJ. (2019). Summary and Conclusion. In: The Syntax and Semantics of Noun Modifiers and the Theory of Universal Grammar. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 96. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05886-9_7
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