Travels in Syntax
A few weeks ago I gave a series of six 90 minutes lectures at KIAS in Seoul, on the mathematics of Generative Linguistics, for an audience of mathematicians. That was my first visit to Korea. The slides of the lectures are available here: Lecture 1, Lectures 2 and 3, Lecture 4, Lecture 5, Lecture 6. The structure of the lectures is roughly the same as my recent graduate course at Caltech (about which I'll give more information in a separate post). One significant difference is that I wanted to make most of the examples in my lectures about Korean, since that was going to be the first language of most of my audience. Well, Korean is not, unfortunately, one of the language that I can to some extend handle, but one week before the trip, while I was trying to plan all the slides for the lectures, I came across this really nice book:
EunHee Lee, "Korean Syntax and Semantics", Cambridge University Press, 2019.
I highly recommend this book to all people interested in seeing the current Merge model of Generative Linguistics embodied in the discussion of a specific language that is not your typical Indo-European SVO language like English. In fact Korean is a perfect choice because, with the failure of the large Altaic and Ural-Altaic hypotheses, it is now believed to be one of the isolated languages that do not fit a large language family, and it therefore a very good test case. The book follows the Minimalist Model, for the syntax part, and Heim-Kratzer truth-conditional compositional semantics. The introductory chapter summarizes both and gives a very quick overview of specific aspects of Korean, in terms of morphosyntax including word order properties, syntax-semantics interface, specific syntactic operations. The chapters from 2 to 4 deal with detailed accounts of theta-theory, case and agreement, and different specific aspects of verb structures, and finite clauses (phrases with tensed verb) and nominal arguments (nouns, quantification, pronouns, case stacking and case ellipsis).
The most interesting chapter, for my own lecture-preparing goals, was the fifth that focuses on Internal Merge in Korean. Indeed, since Korean is one of those languages that do not have wh-movement (wh-in-situ) one of the typical main sources of examples of externalization of Internal Merge is missing. On the other hand, the book presents several aspects of Korean syntax, such as subject and verb raising, that can be accounted for in terms of Internal Merge, and also a detailed analysis of the scrambling phenomenon in Korean. A final chapter deals with complex clauses (nominalized clauses, verbal complementation, subordination and coordination).
So many thanks and a shout out to EunHee Lee for saving my day with the lectures, providing me with tons of very nice examples to use, and generally for writing this great book!
With 9 hours of lectures to give in three days, I did not have all that much time for my absolute favorite pastime, which is taking long random walks through a densely populated vertical metropolis with a definite cyberpunk flavor. The little I could manage of that certainly met my expectations. So definitely Seoul is a great place for travels in syntax (and mathematics).
