A Single Restriction on Scrambling in Korean = A Single Restriction on Scrambling in Korean

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper aims to deepen our understanding of free word order phenomena or scrambling. It offers a unified approach to some fundamental limitations on scrambling in Korean. These would have been attributed to a head parameter in earlier syntactic theories but are problematic in more recent syntactic theories in the minimalist framework where such a parameter cannot be naturally stated. Korean has several limitations on scrambling. It is blocked from proposing the verb. It does not commute noun phrases that bear the same Case, nor does it propose the right member of a small clause. I argue that these descriptive generalizations follow from a single, elegant restriction: only semantically complete or saturated constituents can scramble.