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.

This paper discusses the ways in which formal or model theoretic semantics has difficulty addressing questions of lexical semantics, specifically questions that arise in accounting for the pervasive polysemy of deverbal nominalizations like German Bemalung (painting) and English blending. Formal or model theoretic semantics has largely neglected issues in which analysis of complex words comes to the fore. I briefly review the history of model theoretic semantics and its relation to lexical semantics and illustrate the tendency for conceptual semantics to be quietly integrated into referential semantics, as, for example, in a recent article by Pross (2019). I conclude with a brief sketch of how Lieber’s (2004, 2016) Lexical Semantic Framework treats the polysemy of deverbal nominalizations.