On the Incompatibility between Short Negation and Imperatives

This paper aims to offer an account for why imperatives are not derived from the syntactic structure of short negation in Korean. In so doing, the notion of the Fusion operation in Distributed Morphology is revisited through the lens of the distribution of the morpheme mal- used to negate imperatives. Korean is well-known for its two types of sentential negation: long negation and short negation. Though both forms are typically used to negate declarative and interrogative clauses, imperatives uniquely require the use of the morpheme mal-, resisting both long negation and short negation. Han & Lee (2007) propose a Distributed Morphology account: the imperative negation has the syntactic structure of long negation and the morphological difference is due to the Fusion operation triggered by the deontic modality. However, their approach to why imperative negation cannot be derived from short negation is untenable. I offer an alternative account by (i) reformulating the short-negation derivation and (ii) redefining the notion of Fusion.