Four Types of Adverb NPIs in Korean and their Pragmatics and Syntax

Abstract

A considerable amount of literature on NPIs has taken syntactic and/or semantic approaches to identify their licensing environments. However, adverb NPIs in Korean reveal their own idiosyncratic behaviors which the previous analyses cannot explain. Their behaviors reflect the speaker's different attitudes about the event/situation he is describing. So any appropriate theory of NPIs should be able to account for such pragmatic functions to predict their properties correctly. For this purpose, we propose an integrated theory for them to take into consideration the syntactic and pragmatic properties of Adverb NPIs Ad-NPIs). Pragmatically, we classify Ad-NPIs into 4 types according to their distributional behaviors in rhetorical questions, and we describe the pragmatic functions of Ad-NPIs, which explain why the 4 types of Ad-NPIs show different distributions in rhetorical questions. And we claim that the various properties of the Ad-NPIs can be accounted for by the interaction of a well-defined lexical and syntactic system and the pragmatic component.