Parsing the Wh-Interrogative Construction in Korean

Korean is a wh-in-situ language where the wh-expression stays in situ with an obligatory Q-particle marking its interrogative scope. This paper briefly reviews some basic properties of the wh-question construction in Korean and shows how a typed feature structure grammar, HPSG (Pollard and Sag 1994, Sag et al. 2003), together with the notions of 'type hierarchy' and 'constructions', can provide a robust basis for parsing the wh-construction in the language. We show that this system induces robust syntactic structures as well as enriched semantic representations for real-time applications such as machine translation, which require deep processing of the phenomena concerned.