The time course of long-distance anaphor processing in Korean

While early studies on the Korean long distance anaphor caki describe it to be subject-oriented in that it can only take subject antecedents, similarly to long distance anaphors in many other languages, more recent studies observe that it can take non-subject antecedents as well, especially in the context of certain verbs. This paper presents a visual-world eye-tracking study that tested whether the antecedent potential of caki in an embedded subject position is a function of the matrix subject, the matrix verb, or both, and whether the subject and the verb effects constrain the interpretation of caki in the same way as null pronouns, a commonly used pronominal form in Korean. These questions were addressed through an investigation of how the subject effect and the verb effect were manifested in processing these pronouns. We found that when caki, but not null pronouns, was first processed, there were more fixations to the images representing the matrix subject than the images representing the matrix object regardless of the matrix verb. We further found that the proportions of fixations to the images in both caki and null trials changed after the processing of some sentential verbs. These findings demonstrate that while null pronoun interpretation is a function of the verb effect only, caki-interpretation is a function of both the subject and the verb effect, supporting a multiple-constraints approach to anaphor resolution.

Towards understanding the syntactic representation of honorifics in Korean

One of the salient features of the Korean language is honorifics. Two kinds of honorifics have been discussed in the literature, subject honorific and addressee honorific. The subject honorific is characterized by honorific markers on the subject and predicate. The addressee honorific is usually marked by formal and/or polite speech style particles at the end of a sentence. The subject honorific is characterized by its optionality which has raised many questions about its nature, whether it is a type of formal feature agreement or not. The addressee honorific, however, has not received much attention from a theoretical perspective in the literature though much descriptive work is available. In this paper, we attempt to discuss the optionality of subject honorific in the context of the nature of honorifics in general, including the addressee honorific. More specifically, we examine how honorific is encoded in the grammar by focusing on embedding of honorifics. Some empirical data show that embedding of honorifics (or politeness) is restricted in certain constructions. Based on examining these constructions, we claim that there is a generalization that prohibits the occurrence of honorific/politeness marker in the embedded CP domain. We further claim that this restriction interacts with subject honorific in such a way that it forces the agreement of honorific to take place obligatorily in certain constructions, thereby making the optionality of the subject honorific to hold only conditionally and circumstantially.

Evolution of Korean honorifics

The aim of the present paper is to revisit earlier studies on the evolution of Korean honorifics and, following a brief survey of the contemporary system, (a) overview the historical development of Korean honorific patterns from Old Korean to Contemporary Korean and (b) propose to account, on a principled basis, for the evolutional processes in the framework of grammaticalization. I assume that Korean honorifics have evolved due essentially to the three interdependent language/culture-specific forces: structural, socio-cultural, and interactional, as directed by the language-universal principles and processes of grammaticalization. The essence of the structural forces is the agglutinative, predicate-final, and head-final morpho-syntactic nature of Korean. This typological salience is a crucial condition under which honorific affixes and particles may be germinated. Socio-cultural forces include the Korean people’s traditional and contemporary socio-cultural systems, values, and norms of hierarchism and collectivism, as language is regarded as reflecting culture and society. Koreans’ hierarchism and collectivism are sufficiently manifested in the structure and use of the language (e.g. H. Sohn 1986). The interactional forces are Koreans’ society/culture/context-bound interpersonal language use for communicative purposes. These three interlocking forces are assumed to have motivated and sustained a dynamic set of addressee and referent honorific contrasts in Korean, which have evolved as driven by the universal principles and processes of grammaticalization.

Expressive, social and gendered meanings of Korean honorifics

Traditional research on Korean honorifics has tended to assume that these forms have fixed meanings such as deference and respect. In this paper, I argue that such meanings only represent the most prototypical and normative expressive meanings of honorific forms. By surveying recent pragmatics and sociolinguistic research, I show how honorifics can communicate a variety of context-specific affective meanings. Some of these meanings, such as sarcasm and factuality, are very distant from the presumption that honorifics are markers of deference. In addition to affective meanings, I also argue that honorifics have social meanings. In other words, when speakers use honorifics, these forms communicate something about the speaker’s own identity. Someone who uses honorifics well may be perceived as educated, well-bred and even as a “good” Korean. Finally, I discuss how honorifics are tied up with gendered meanings in Korean speech and how phonetics may be playing a role.

Decomposing complex serialization

This paper investigates the role of merger and the typology of v in the syntax of Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) in Korean. Some SVCs with a derivational suffix (e.g. a causative/passive v) in Korean display distinct behavior from the others. We argue that this is due to different syntactic structures among SVCs and that SVCs in Korean must be divided into two sub-types: H(igh)-SVC and L(ow)-SVC. Specifically, we propose that different types of SVCs result from different merger sites of the derivational v head. An H-SVC results when a causative or passive v head is merged to a verb before it is serialized with another verb; an L-SVC results when verbal serialization occurs prior to the merger of the derivational v head. We then turn our attention to a condition on verbal serialization, and propose that verbs can be serialized only when their v heads bear the specific identical property of introducing an external argument. We show that our matching condition coupled with the proposed dichotomy of SVCs has broader empirical coverage than the previous analyses. Theoretically, our study supports the claim that the morphology and the syntax are intertwined so that the attachment site of derivational suffixes may vary in syntax. Our argument also provides novel support for the finer-grained classification of v heads.

Overriding syntactic islands with prosodically marked wh-scope in South Kyŏngsang Korean and two dialects of Japanese

This article explores the effect of discourse context and prosody on the resolution of wh-scope ambiguity in Tokyo Japanese, Fukuoka Japanese, and South Kyŏngsang Korean. It focuses on wh-islands in particular. There is little consensus in the literature as to whether wh-island effects are present in Japanese or Korean (Huang 1982, Nishigauchi 1990, Lee 1982, Suh 1987, among others). A production study, in which a scope-ambiguous wh-interrogative was preceded by a disambiguating discourse context, demonstrates that speakers’ scope interpretation is consistent with the preceding discourse context. An additional comprehension study reveals that prosodic wh-scope marking observed in the languages studied improves the acceptability of the matrix scope readings in violation of wh-islands. The experimental results support the view that wh-island effects can be overridden by plausible discourse contexts as well as the appropriate prosodic marking of wh-scope. These results highlight the interaction of grammatical knowledge, contextual factors, and prosody.

Social meanings of honorific / non-honorific alternations in Korean and Japanese

The use of honorifics in Korean and Japanese is generally dictated by social factors such as age, status, and gender (Sohn 1999, Kuno 1987). Honorifics are marked by a well-defined repertoire of linguistic elements, including address-terms, specialized vocabulary, and verbal suffixes. Depending on the relationship between the interlocutors, an honorific form is chosen over the other available forms. Recently, researchers have been questioning whether the choice is wholly dependent on the relative status, or if other factors play a role in the selection process (Strauss and Eun 2005, Dunn 2005, Yoon 2015). This study focuses on the honorifics productively encoded by verbal suffixes. Unexpectedly, continual shifts between verbal suffixes are observed in a single speech situation. Based on the analyses of media data, we identify a set of social meanings encoded by these shifts. Furthermore, we show that Silverstein’s notion of “indexical order” (Silverstein 2003) is crucial for accounting for suffix alternation.

The base of Korean noun paradigms

This paper reports and analyzes the tonal patterns that emerge in South Kyengsang monosyllabic nouns that exhibit two well-known analogical changes in stem shape, one involving coronal obstruent codas and the other stems with an underlying cluster. By the first change, underlying and orthographic /nach/ ‘face’ inflects as nat̚, nach-ɨl (conservative) or nas-ɨl (innovative); and by the second underlying /talk/ ‘chicken’ inflects as tak̚, talk-ɨl (conservative) or tak-ɨl (innovative). We find that many such nouns with a high-low tonal pattern change to high-high when inflected with the segmentally innovative stem. We propose that this tonal change supports the model of Korean noun paradigms proposed in Albright (2008) and Do (2013) in which the citation form serves as the base for the construction of the suffixed forms. If the base is a neutralization site, then learners select the alternant in which they have the greatest confidence of scoring a correct hit when undoing the neutralization.