Exceptional ECM with a Cognitive Verb in Korean

Abstract

Pota in Korean is originally a verb of visual perception expressing the meaning ‘see’. It has also undergone grammaticalization to take on various extended meanings and grammatical functions. In this paper, I focus on one of the variants of pota, namely, cognitive pota, the meaning of which is close to ‘suppose’ or ‘consider’. Cognitive pota is similar to original pota in that it takes two arguments, while it also differs from the latter in that the internal argument must be a clause. Depending on whether the clausal complement is a full clause or a small clause, the pattern of case assignment to the NPs in the sentence changes. In particular, when cognitive pota takes a small clause, the subject of the small clause is assigned accusative case, while the verb in question cannot assign accusative case independently. Nevertheless, the availability of accusative case assigned to the small clause subject is determined by the properties of the main clause, making it a special type of ECM construction. I argue that the state of affairs can be straightforwardly captured by Marantz’s (1991) configurational case assignment system.