Existential constructions in Korean and English: A revised mapping approach to situation variables and presuppositionality

• 발행기관: 경희대학교 언어정보연구소
• 저자명: Yoon-Ho Jeon
• 간행물 정보: 『언어연구』제43권 제2호, 403~425쪽, 전체 23쪽
• 주제분류: 인문학 > 언어학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2026.06.30

국문 초록

Existential constructions have long been central to discussions of the syntax-semantics interface, particularly under Diesing’s (1992) Mapping Hypothesis, which links VP-internal material to existential closure. While this framework successfully accounts for English there-existentials, Korean locative existentials display interpretive contrasts that cannot be reduced to a simple VP-external distinction on noun phrases. Building on Jeon (2019), which argues for a VP-CP mapping architecture in the domain of genericity, this paper extends that structural framework to existential constructions. I argue that while VP remains the locus of existential closure, Korean differs from English in allowing situation variables to be interpreted in the CP domain, yielding presuppositional readings. The identification of CP as the restrictive domain is not a straightforward extension of Diesing’s TP-based architecture, but a theoretically motivated revision grounded in independent syntactic evidence concerning subject positions and information-structural movement in Korean. By incorporating situation variables into the mapping mechanism, the analysis derives the contrast between existential and presuppositional readings compositionally, without appealing to nominal definiteness. The cross-linguistic comparison shows that differences between English and Korean existential constructions arise from variation in access to higher clausal domains rather than from differences in existential predication itself.

목차

1. Introduction

2. Existential closure and the mapping hypothesis

3. Korean existential constructions

4. Analysis: Mapping structure, situation variables, and existential interpretation

5. Empirical consequences

6. English existentials and the limits of CP-level interpretation

7. Conclusion

References

키워드

existential constructions situation variables Mapping Hypothesis presuppositionality VP-CP domains

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