Korean Honorific Agreement too Guides Null Argument Resolution: Evidence from an Offline Study

Though there has emerged a number of studies that have dealt with (null) pronoun resolution in various languages, such as English, Finnish, Italian, Spanish, and Russian (Kazanina et al., 2007; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006; Kaiser, 2003), relatively little attention has been paid to pronoun resolution in Korean-type null subject languages, in which pronouns whose referents are easily accessible in the context are often omitted. Subjects in pro drop languages, such as Italian and Spanish, can be omitted when there is overt agreement. However, null subjects in “topic-drop” languages (Huang, 1984), such as Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, are not licensed by strong agreement features, but by strong contextual or discourse features. Though verb agreement for person, number, and gender is not syntactically overt in Korean, other agreement features are evident, such as the honorific agreement and subject-mood agreement. While the honorific agreement in Korean indicates sentence well-formedness, Cho (1994) argues that honorific markers are not rich enough to identify null subjects. However, this has never been tested empirically.