Chapter 12 analyzes the phenomenon whereby various types of elements may appear in postverbal position in Korean: arguments such as the subject, the object, the indirect object, and clausal complements may be dislocated to the right. Moreover, a variety of non-argument projections such as adverbials, prepositional phrases, relative clauses, and small clause predicates may also appear in a postverbal position. The chapter focuses on two basic issues on RDCs: (i) whether the RDC involves a mono-clausal or bi-clausal structure and (ii) whether postverbal elements undergo movement or are base-generated. The chapter also looks into differences among sub-varieties of RDCs in Korean, as classified by the grammatical and semantic function of the Right-Dislocated material, the type of the correlate in the main clause, and the number of dislocated items. Cross-linguistic implications of the Korean data for the current research on RDCs in other languages such as English, Dutch, German, and Bangla are also discussed.

This chapter reviews a number of issues concerning Scandinavian object shift and object scrambling of the type found in the Germanic OV-languages. It differs from earlier reviews in that it adopts as its null hypothesis that the two phenomena should be given a unified treatment. An important reason for this is that object shift and scrambling are subject to similar effect-on-output conditions. This raises the question why object shift and scrambling behave differently with respect to, e.g., Holmberg’s Generalization. It will be argued that this is due to the fact that object movement is subject to various language-specific, violable constraints.

This chapter reviews the syntactic and prosodic correlates of information structure in Germanic languages. The chapter starts with an introduction to the information structural notions: focus, topic, and givenness related to the way information is stored in human memory and organized in communication. The effect of information structure on prosody in these languages can be felt in several ways: pitch accent addition because of focus, pitch accent deletion because of givenness, topicalization because of topic. In syntax, the effects are also numerous: scrambling, a series of leftward movements: topicalization, passivization, dative construction, object-shift, and a series of rightward movements: extraposition, right-dislocation, heavy NP-shift, afterthought. Pronominalization and ellipsis are the results of givenness. At the end of the chapter, focus-sensitive particles (or “association with focus”) like exclusive only, additive also and scalar even, are shortly mentioned. Germanic languages show a wealth of effects, but they also differ among each other in subtle ways.

In North-Germanic languages and English, VPs are head-initial. In continental West-Germanic languages, VPs are head-final. This chapter surveys major syntactic contrasts that directly correlate with this structural difference. Head-initial phrases are structurally more tightly constrained than head-final phrases. Since clauses typically contain VPs, constraints on VPs are reflected in the clause structure. Syntactic differences triggered by head-positioning show in contrasts such as the following. Head-initial VPs are strictly ordered, that is, the relative order of arguments does not change; adjuncts do not intervene between the head and the arguments; the relative order of auxiliaries is invariable. In addition to the VP-internal contrasts, there are VP-external ones, too. Adjuncts preceding head-initial phrases are head-adjacent, hence adjuncts preceding head-initial VPs are minimized. Finally, head-initial VPs with a preverbal subject entail clause structures with an obligatory subject position. All these restrictions are absent when the VP is head-final.

Chapter 7 deals with syntax proper. In this chapter, we discuss Category 2 (verbal and adjectival) formation, basic sentence structure, and the passive and causative patterns. We describe five basic patterns of predication: verbal predicates, adjectival predicates, nominal (copular) predicates, auxiliaries, and irregular predicates. We begin with basic sentence patterns, then introduce “scrambling” phenomena (that is, variations in word order), clausal embedding, and other complex sentence patterns. For both passive and causative constructions, we describe the basic shape of the patterns, the three-way distinction of lexical, morphological, and syntactic passives and causatives, and major syntactic characteristics of each. As with lexical passives, lexical causatives are underived. Morphological causatives involve seven allomorphs, four homophonous with the suffixes of the morphological passive. We survey the four patterns of syntactic causatives, and explain the major syntactic differences between morphological and syntactic causatives. We show that from an areal/typological perspective, Korean fits the North Asian pattern of primarily causativizing (transitivizing) languages.