• Language and Information
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.107-124
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• 2000

This paper reports the syntactic distribution of amu-N-to/-ilato/-ina phrase, which are representative polarity sensitive items. (PSIs) in Korean, and ac- counts for their semantic characteristics in therms of "arbitrary choice quantification" and "concession" In the first section, we extensively illustrate the distributional behaviour of the PSIs in various costructions and roughly generalize the distribu- tion in terms of "(anti/non-) verdicality" Section 2 claims amu denotes an arbi- trary choice quantifier and the particles -to/-ilato/-ina as "concessive" markers, so the compounds denote a special element in a pragmatic scale determined by con- text/situation, Section 3. based on the pragmatics of scalar implicature, accounts for the apparent ambiguity of PSIs between "universal"and "existential"readings and further characterizes the difference among the concessive markers -to/-ilato/-ina in terms of "quantity/ quality scale."rkers -to/-ilato/-ina in terms of "quantity/ quality scale."

• Language and Information
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.21-47
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• 2008

This paper reviews the analysis of the so-called Korean NPIs, amu-(N)-to and amu-(N)-rato, proposed by An (2007). An proposes that the two so-called polarity items are identical semantically, tantamount to English even, but they are in complementary distribution due to the opposite scope properties of the emphatic particles to and rato contained in the NPIs in question. Resorting to Karttunen and Peters' (1979) and Wilkinson's (1996) scope analysis of even, Lahiri's (1998) analysis of Hindi NPIs, and Guerzoni's (2002) analysis of the negative bias of yes/no-questions containing minimizers, An accounts for the distributional properties of the two Korean NPIs. Given this, however, it is observed that unlike amu-(N)-to, amu-(N)-rato could be licensed in much broader contexts. Based on this observation, this paper proposes that the two particles to and rato are two different particles with different meanings.