Focus Types and Subject-Object Asymmetry in Korean Case Ellipsis: A New Look at Focus Effects

Acceptability of case ellipsis on focused subjects and objects exhibits clear asymmetry which so far has not received a plausible explanation. Case ellipsis on focused direct objects occurs naturally, whereas case ellipsis on focused transitive subjects is unnatural whether the subject is contrastively focused or not. The main purpose of this paper is to provide experimental evidence that the degree of acceptability of case ellipsis on focused argument NPs in Korean is sensitive to the usage probability of their properties. Our experiment shows that the degree of acceptability of case ellipsis on focused argument NPs in Korean and the strength of the influence of focus types on case ellipsis both correlate with the likelihood for the argument’s referent to be new information. We argue that this finding lends support to the view that language users’ intuitions of acceptability in context are probability-sensitive in that their preferences are affected by the usage probability of properties of argument NPs.