Sanghoun Song (University of Washington). 2010. Pragmatic Usage of Wh -elements in Korean. Language Information . Volume 10. 95-117.
This paper investigates peculiar usages of Wh -elements in Korean. The usages that this paper covers, which often refer to rhetorical questions, have a property of both interrogatives and quantifiers simultaneously. That means, the Wh -elements function like a trigger to derive the form of interrogative sentences, but they convey quantificational readings. This paper provides several constraints of the peculiar usages of Wh -elements; in particular, the Wh -elements show a tendency to co-occur with some adverbs that express speaker's psychological status. On top of this, this paper also looks into the pragmatically peculiar usage of 'why' in Korean. If the 'why' word in Korean appears in tag questions, it assumes two properties; one is the word itself is optional, the other is the word always co-occur with stative verbs.
Key words: Wh -element, Wh -word, pragmatic usages, constraints on Wh -element