Complex Verb Constructions in Child Korean: Overt Markers of Covert Functional Structure

In this paper we will apply to Korean the standard techniques which have been used to show that young children represent functional projections mainly for European languages. And what we find is the following: First, we suggest that the over-use of the default mood-inflection '-e' in the earliest speech of one Korean two-year old parallels root infinitive forms observed in other languages. Second, the absence of inflectional morphemes and the absence of correlations between specific verb forms and null-subjects, or tense markers, seem to be consistent with the view that children initially have only lexical categories. Despite this apparently strong evidence for a prefunctional analysis of child Korean syntax, we argue that the systematic presence of the linking morpheme '-ko-' in truncated auxiliary verb constructions implies that at least some level of functional structure is represented, even when it is never produced.