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

Focus Types and Subject-Object Asymmetry in Korean Case Ellipsis: A New Look at Focus Effects* Hanjung Lee and Haejeong Choi Department of English Language and Literature, Sungkyunkwan University, 53 Myoungryun-dong, 3 ga, Jongro-ku, Seoul 110-745, Korea {hanjung, choihj}@skku.edu Abstract. 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. Keywords: case ellipsis, case marking, focus types, predictability, usage probability 1 Introduction Particle ellipsis is the phenomenon whereby speakers omit NP-final particles. One common type of particle ellipsis in Korean is case ellipsis, whereby case markers like –i/-ka and -(l)ul are omitted. An example of ellipsis of case markers is given in (1): (1) a. ecey Minswu-ka chinkwu-lul manna-ss-ta. yesterday Minsoo-Nom friend-Acc meet-Pst-Ind ‘Minsoo met his friend yesterday.’ b. ecey Minswu-ka chinkwu manna-ss-ta. yesterday Minsoo-Nom friend(-Acc) meet-Pst-Ind ‘Minsoo met his friend yesterday.’ In (1b), the object chinkwu ‘friend’ appears without the following accusative case marker -lul, which would normally indicate the object of the verb. While (1a) and (1b) are semantically equivalent, i.e., in both cases the agent is Minswu and the theme is chinkwu ‘friend’, they may differ in contextually determined meanings, pragmatic functions, and attitudes of interlocutors. It is often claimed that case ellipsis in Japanese and Korean is constrained by discourse and semantic factors such as focus and contrastiveness. A number of previous studies have suggested that case markers in Japanese and Korean cannot be dropped when the argument they mark is contrastively focused (Tsutsui, 1984; Masunaga, 1988; Yatabe, 1999; Ko 2000; D. Lee, 2002). However, these studies were not based on careful comparison of patterns of case ellipsis when subject and object are in focus. As observed by H. Lee (2009a, 2009b), the ellipsis of the case markers marking a focused direct object occurs much more naturally than that of the case * The work reported in this paper was supported by a grant from the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF- 2010-327-A00210). Copyright 2010 by Hanjung Lee and Haejeong Choi PACLIC 24 Proceedings 213 markers marking a focused transitive subject, and in certain cases object case ellipsis is favored even though the object is contrastively focused. In this paper …

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