Long-distance Agreement of WH-words and Long-distance Licensing of NPIs

The long-distance agreement between a Wh-element or a Wh-phrase and a question operator takes place across a clause-boundary in Korean. Such an agreement depends upon whether an intervening complementizer is transparent or not. The complementizer of an adjunct clause is also transparent because the long-distance agreement is possible across such a clause. However, the long-distance NPI licensing across a clause boundary is much more restricted. Nevertheless, the current paper aims to delve into the mechanism of a long-distance NPI licensing. Like in Russian, the long-distance NPI licensing in Korean may be approved although a negative element and an NPI are placed across a clause. The feature checking between +Neg and an NPI occurs across the transparent complemetizer such as –key, -cikey, -ki(/ko) and -(u)myen in an infinitival clause which lacks an overt tense morpheme. The reason why the long-distance NPI licensing is approved is that the infinitival clause does not project a strong phase, but a weak phase. The Phase-Impenetrability Condition is not applied in a weak CP. In this vein, the paper argues that the transitive resultative construction is a typical example of a weak phase in Korean.