Null pronominal (pro) resolution in Korean, a discourse-oriented language

We report a self-paced reading experiment examining the effect of morpho-syntactic and discourse cues on the resolution of null pronominals in Korean. Unlike many other languages, Korean does not have many morphological cues that could aid reference assignment for null pronominals. Indeed, work in theoretical linguistics has classified Korean as a “discourse oriented language”, in which empty arguments can be identified through discourse topics, with less reliance on sentence-internal cues than is the case for “sentence oriented” languages such as English. The experiment used a person-mismatch paradigm to test whether, once assigned to a discourse topic, the reference of the null pronominal could be shifted to a new intra-sentential antecedent, on the basis of morpho-syntactic cues, as has been shown in work in English on overt pronouns. The findings show that the null pronominal was assigned to the discourse topic on-line during the reading of the sentence, but that the re-assignment to the intra-sentential antecedent did not take place, despite the morpho-syntactic cues. Instead, co-reference with the intra-sentential subject was attempted only when there was no antecedent in the context. We interpret these findings in terms of the relatively high priority that Korean places on discourse cues.