Anaphoric definiteness marking in Korean: focusing on subject definites

• Published in: Journal of East Asian linguistics Vol. 32; no. 3; pp. 373 - 409
• Main Author: Kim, Min-Joo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.09.2023
• Subjects: Chinese; Comparative Linguistics; Japanese; Language and Literature; Linguistics; Social Sciences; Theoretical Linguistics; Anaphoric definiteness; Index; Demonstrative; Bare noun; Locative
• ISSN: 0925-8558; 1572-8560
• DOI: 10.1007/s10831-023-09260-y

This article takes a close look at subject anaphoric definites in Korean, with the goal of identifying (i) the distribution of anaphoric bare nouns and demonstrative-NPs and (ii) their form-meaning correlation. I show that the choice between an anaphoric bare noun and a demonstrative-NP is not as free as has been held in the literature (e.g., Ahn in THAT thesis: A competition mechanism for anaphoric expressions. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 2019; Simpson and Wu, in: Simpson, A (ed) New explorations in Chinese theoretical syntax: studies in honor of Yen-Hui Audrey Li. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 301–330, 2022; Park in Linguist Res 39(1):25–54, 2022). I capture their distributional and interpretive properties by proposing different semantics and syntax for them. I claim that demonstratives encode a locative relation between the speaker and the definite individual at issue and that demonstrative-NPs have a different distribution than anaphoric bare nouns because they carry what I call exophoric index as opposed to what I call endophoric index (compare Jenks in Linguist Inq 49(3):501–536, 2018; Ahn in THAT thesis: A competition mechanism for anaphoric expressions. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 2019; Dayal and Jiang in Linguist Inq 54(1):147–167, 2023). I further argue that demonstrative-NPs come with a presupposition, but their presupposition is not about anti-uniqueness (compare Simonenko in Grammatical ingredients of definiteness. Doctoral dissertation, McGill University, 2014; Dayal and Jiang in Linguist Inq 54(1):147–167, 2023). Moreover, I classify anaphoric bare nouns into two kinds, what I call situation-internally licensed definites , and what I call text-internally licensed quasi-names , additionally suggesting a new classification of anaphoric definites as well as other types of definites in Korean. This paper has implications for the syntax/semantics of indices, the semantics/syntax/pragmatics of weak definites and strong definites , and crosslinguistic variation in definiteness marking. It also provides evidence for the existence of a functional layer above NP in bare noun languages (compare Fukui in Engl Linguist 5:249–270, 1988; Bošković, in: Walkow, Elfner (eds) Proceedings of NELS 37. GLSA, Amherst, pp 101–114, 2008).