Partial Chain Pronunciation at the PF Interface

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The most widely accepted theories of chain pronunciation depict that (i) a syntactic chain is pronounced exactly once in the highest position at the point of spell-out; that (ii) the low copy may be pronounced under a certain phonological condition at the PF interface. In this paper, I investigate a third possibility that the choice of the copies to be deleted is governed by a PF legibility condition on interface interpretation. The construction of our particular concern is a split NP construction in Korean, where the modifier parts of canonical NPs appear in reversed order in more than one position of the sentence. I will show that the surface word order and other peculiarities of this construction is a corollary of partial chain pronunciation by a PF legibility condition which forces to eliminate the copies with illegitimate formal features at the PF interface.