UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation argues that DP arguments cannot and should not be subsumed under a c(ategory)-selectional analysis, and are not licensed by the mechanisms that guide head-complement relations. I present three in-depth investigations of Sino-Korean loanwords and the construction of Sino- and native Korean complex predicates, making the following claims about the nature of internal argument realization: 1.) Internal arguments, unlike external arguments, cannot be severed from the lexical predicate, and are not introduced by a functional projection, of either the verbal or nominal domain (Chapter 2). In fact, Sino-Korean loanwords empirically necessitate that a categorical syntactic entities— Roots— are themselves internal argument introducers.2.) DP arguments are not always syntactically projected, though they are always semantically represented (Chapter 3). Syntactic argument projection, rather than being obligatory, is in fact one of two possible routes for the syntactic realization of an internal argument. Korean incorporation phenomena reveal that the semantic profile of being an argument-introducing predicate leads to two possible structural realities: direct saturation of the argument slot via syntactic realization of a DP argument, or restrictive modification and existential closure of the argument variable.3.) DP arguments do not require a syntactic head to license them (Chapter 4), only the presence of a predicative entity, which, in the right environment, can be realized as a maximal projection of a Root. I demonstrate empirically, through a close investigation of Korean argument displacement constructions, that syntactic introduction of a DP argument tracks the structural location of constituents that denote argument-introducing predicates, not the location of syntactic heads.This collection of facts, when taken together, paints DP argument introduction as a phenomenon that cannot be mediated by category feature selection in Syntax, but is instead driven by the semantic principles of predication and composition, constrained by the structural location of argument-introducing predicates. In short, argumenthood must be defined beyond what the standard tools of Syntax give us, comparable to the way that researchers often characterize s(emantic)-selection as positional but dependent on principles beyond what Syntax proper can account for.