| The purpose of this thesis is two-sided: the first is language-specific and the second is language-universal. The first is to understand the aspectual role Korean verbal noun objects play in syntax/semantics correspondences, that is, what syntactic and semantic elements we need to refer to in accounting for the restricted distribution of Korean verbal noun objects: (a) they can serve as complements to the verb hata 'do', but not the perception verb pota 'see', both of which are known to semantically selects for events as complements, and (b) only atelic, but not telic, verbal nouns can serve as complements to the verb hata 'do'.; The second is to clarify discrete layers of aspectual structure, that is, a division between an external aspectual projection, AspP, associated with the IP domain and an internal aspectual projection, small aspP, associated with the VP domain. Incorporating observations made with path phrases (such as duratives and verbal nouns objects) into the checking mechanisms concerning syntactic derivations, I propose that the presence of a path in need of accusative case is linked to the internal aspect phrase of small aspP, which licenses goal-oriented telicity. The external aspectual projection, AspP, is persistently active for licensing lexical predicates to properly serve as complements in extensional (or referential) contexts. The proposal contributes to a better understanding of the way the aspectual properties of a sentence are encoded in phrase structure. |
