Subject Preference in Korean

Long-distance dependencies have long been at the center of linguists’ attention, and have played an important role in the ongoing dialogue between theoreticians and experimentalists, who share an interest in the motivation for empty categories and in the nature of filler-gap relationships. In this paper, we address certain issues that arise with regard to Korean relative clauses from both a theoretical and an experimental perspective. Theoretically, the data that we present shed additional light on—but do not entirely resolve—long-standing controversies pertaining to the appropriate analysis of Korean relative clauses. Experimentally, we present robust evidence that even in head-final languages like Korean, subject gaps of all types enjoy a processing advantage. Long-distance dependencies between two clausal positions have two crucial characteristics. First, a more articulated expression in one of these positions determines the referential identity of the linguistic expression in the other position. This latter expression typically has less descriptive content and may even be null. For example, a lexically specified noun phrase can serve as the antecedent of a pronoun (including a null pronoun) (1a), an epithet (1b), or a hypothetical null element (1c). Second, the relationship between the lexically specified antecedent (filler) and the less elaborated expression or null element (gap) is established at a distance, across other linguistic expressions that separate them. This distance between the two positions imposes a burden on working memory: the first linguistic position has to be held in (or retrieved from) working memory so that it can be associated with the second.