On the Derivation of Korean Sluicing and Countersluicing

Recent studies have shown growing interest in countersluicing and its relation to sluicing. Hiraiwa and Kobayashi (2020) proposed a unified analysis in which both sluicing and countersluicing are derived from identical cleft structures, whereas Nakamura (2021) argued for a split analysis in Japanese, claiming that sluicing is derived via a move-and-delete strategy, while countersluicing is consistently cleft-based. This study investigates countersluicing in Korean. By applying Nakamura’s diagnostics, including case-marking asymmetries, island sensitivity, polarity-sensitive item licensing, and the distribution of predicative foci, this study shows that Korean sluicing and countersluicing behave uniformly. In particular, both constructions exhibit the same restrictions on case marking, fail to license polarity-sensitive foci, pattern identically with respect to island repair, and are constrained by the nominal pivot requirement of kes-clefts. These results indicate that both Korean sluicing and countersluicing originate from pseudo-cleft structures. I argue that Korean countersluicing is best analyzed as an ellipsis of the focused element in a kes-cleft, and that Korean provides robust support for a unified analysis in which sluicing and countersluicing are syntactically isomorphic.