On Wh-Scrambling

Abstract

Gwangrak Son. 2002. On Wh-Scrambling. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 27-2, 293-314. In this paper, I claim that overt wh-scrambling in Korean and Japanese, which has been traditionally viewed as a semantically vacuous movement, needs to be reinterpreted as a strategy to mark specificity. More specifically, I claim that wh-phrases inherently unmarked for specificity (e.g., nwuku 'who' and mues 'what' in Korean) obtain a specific interpretation (in terms of Enc (1991)) as a bi-product of scrambling. By appearance, there are two ways of marking specificity in Korean and Japanese: one overt wh-scrambling and the other stress assignment. By reducing stress assignment into a syntactic form of movement, I will show that the two seemingly different strategies are merely mnemonic, the difference being only the matter of whether movement is visible or invisible to PF. (Kyungnam University)