FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES AND COMPLEMENTATION: IN ENGLISH, KOREAN AND TURKISH

Hang-Jin Yoon

Ph.D. Dissertation, 1991

Abstract

Languages typically have several clausal complement constructions which vary in syntactic distribution. This thesis is an attempt to analyze and compare some of these clausal complements in English, Korean and Turkish. We especially focus on so-called 'clausal nominals' such as gerunds in English and Turkish and the corresponding constructions in Korean. Paying attention to the Janus-faced characteristics of these constructions which have both nominal and sentential aspects, we explore the possibility of analyzing so-called functional categories like COMP and INFL as having an internal feature structure such as COMP (+N), COMP ($-$N), etc. On the basis of the Extended X'-Theory, we propose that these constructions are the projections of functional categories, arguing against the view that recognizes the existence of a noun phrase in these constructions. The nominal aspect of these constructions is attributed to the core features of the head of projections such as the (+N) feature. The sentential aspect of them is naturally ascribed to the internal structure of these constructions which is equivalent to that of finite clauses. In chapter 2 and 3, we investigate gerunds in English, and their counterparts in Korean and Turkish respectively. We consider the consequences of our assumption in chapter 4. We conclude the thesis with the proposal that these constructions are basically similar in their structure; minimal cross-linguistic variation lies in several parametric differences such as the difference in Case assigning system.