Description
This thesis investigates the syntax and semantics of Korean serial verb constructions (SVCs). Argument structure was analyzed using Lexical Functional Grammar and event structures. Two main focuses of this thesis are syntactic and semantic restrictions among verbs and argument identification. The data examined in this thesis validate the hypothesis that subject arguments are always identified in Korean SVCs (the Subject Sharing Hypothesis). Among other things, this hypothesis predicts the absence of resultative constructions in Korean SVCs. In Chapter 3, a corpus analysis was conducted to examine verb types and verb order as well as to determine how well the argument identification principles in the literature correspond with real data. In Chapter 4, the argument structure of deictic and path verbs was studied with the application of event structures, which helped to explain unsolved issues such as the consequential and simultaneous distinctions and the optionality of a path argument in path-deictic constructions.
