Chapter 3 presents an overview of issues in Korean syntax. The specific chapters on syntax address topics that have received attention in both traditional and contemporary investigations of Korean (morpho) syntax, such as anaphora (Han) and nominalizations (Yoon), as well as some that have not previously been investigated in depth, such as Sino-Korean person-denoting nominals (Kim and Sells). The chapter on Right Dislocation (Ko) deals with a construction that received relatively little discussion in traditional or early generative analyses but has emerged as a central testing ground for contemporary debates on movement, ellipsis, and related issues. Finally, Kwon’s contribution deals with real-time processing of syntactic dependencies, which traditionally falls within the field of psycholinguistics. While the papers by Ko, Han, and Kwon are surveys, those by Kim and Sells, and Yoon are not, although the latter tries to situate the proposed analysis against the backdrop of longstanding debates in the analysis of lexical nominalizations in generative grammar. Overall, the collection of papers strikes a balance between familiar topics and newer, lesser-known, topics.

Chapter 15 investigates the feasibility of an all-syntax approach to lexical nominalizations in Korean. In addition to productive syntactic nominalizations, Korean possesses a rich inventory of deverbal, i.e., lexical, nominalizations. The consensus in the field since the advent of the Lexicalist Hypothesis (Chomsky 1970) that syntactic and lexical nominalizations are formed in different grammatical components has been questioned in recent approaches that advocate a unified syntactic analysis of all nominalizations. The investigation reveals that while there are lexical nominalizations that are argument-bearing, previous arguments purporting to support separation of complex event nominals and simple event, or result, nominals, ultimately do not go through in Korean. Examination of a class of lexical nominalizations that bear some hallmarks of syntactic derivation leads to the same conclusion. Thus, deverbal lexical nominalizations in Korean do not support the kind of unified syntactic analysis of nominalizations that is currently dominant in the literature.