Topics and Null arguments in Korean: the syntax and discourse

Null arguments and topics have been studied as two distinct phenomena, which are separately attributed to the discourse-oriented parameter and topic-prominent typology, respectively. As argued in Huang (1984), null arguments are allowed in languages like Korean, because they are discourse-recoverable, carrying old information. On the other hand, topics occur in the sentence-initial position in Korean, based on Li and Thompson’s (1976) typological taxonomy of topicprominence. In this article, I am going to report the following observations on topics and null arguments in Korean, which show that the two phenomena are in fact related. First, the relationship between topics and null arguments are based on predication, rather than construal, following Chomsky (1977), by which a topic saturates an open proposition which may or may not contain a null argument. Second, topics and null arguments carry old information, which can be termed as shifted topics and anaphoric topics, in Herring’s (1990) sense. Their different syntactic manifestations, as a topic or a null argument, are determined based on the presence or absence of discourse prominence. Third, the discourse concept of topics as carrying discourse prominence is syntactically manifested in the left-periphery, in Spec of TopP, the head of which is occupied by the [+topic] feature. Fourth, the [+topic] feature is morphologically manifested by -nun, which makes a topic with the –nun marker scoped-out, from the rest of the sentence, resulting in a categorical judgment (Kuroda, 1972).