Japanese/Korean Linguistics

This paper seeks to provide an answer to why there is so much disagreement on data instantiating the ACC-marked external possession construction (EPC) in Korean; when ACC-marked EP sentences in Korean are licensed; and why EP-encoding multiple-accusative sentences and non-EP-encoding multiple-accusative sentences have the same surface form even though the latter do not have a grammatical internal possession counterpart. By conducting a carefully-constructed grammaticality judgment task, I argue that speakers have variable acceptability judgments for the EPC because of its pragmatically marked nature; a uniform analysis of the construction is not possible but it can be classified into three subtypes depending on the semantics of the V and the Part-to-Whole Spread possibility in the sense of Dowty (2001); and in all grammatical cases, the possessor NP functions as what I call a Topic-Focus, and this explains why both EP-encoding and non-EP-encoding multiple-accusative sentences have the same surface form.