Pro-active Parsing of Korean Scrambling

This paper argues that the processing of Korean is incremental and moreover ‘pro-active’. Though the verb, which triggers the actual composition, comes at the end, the parser of Korean can build up a structure incrementally from the very beginning with the help of prosody and case. In particular, based on scrambling (e.g., local, long-distance, multiple long-distance scrambling), we shall show that on-line interaction between prosody and case specification along with structural abduction play a crucial role in incremental structure building in Korean. In this paper, we adopt the parsing-based framework, Dynamic Syntax (Kempson et al. 2001, Cann et al. 2005) and show that the characteristics of pro-active parsing of Korean are consequences of monotonic-structure growth processes from left to right.