A Syntactic Account of the Properties of Bare Nominals in Discourse

A Syntactic Account of the Properties of Bare Nominals in Discourse* Hee-Don Ahn aand Sungeun Cho b aDepartment of English, Konkuk University, Seoul 143-701, Korea, hdahn@konkuk.ac.kr bDepartment of English, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul 110-745, Korea, scho1007@skku.edu Abstract. Case markers in Korean are omissible in colloquial speech. Previous discourse studies of Caseless bare NPs in Korean show that the information structure of zero Nominative not only differs from that of overt Nominative but it also differs from that of zero Accusative in many respects. This paper aims to provide a basis for these semantic/pragmatic properties of Caseless NPs through the syntactic difference between bare subjects and bare objects: namely, the former are left-dislocated NPs, whereas the latter form complex predicates with the subcategorizing verbs. Our analysis will account for the facts that (i) the distribution of bare subject NPs are more restricted than that of bare object NPs; (ii) bare subject NPs must be specific or topical; (iii) Acc-marked NPs in canonical position tend to be focalized. Keywords: Case markers, bare nominals, left-dislocated NPs, focalization 1. Introduction Case markers in Korean are omissible in colloquial speech. Many previous studies of Caseless bare NPs in Korean show that subject-object asymmetries are observed in various respects. For example, as observed in the wide range of conversational data (H. Lee 2006b-c), occurrence rate of bare NPs in complement position is higher than that of bare NPs in subject positions. The grammatical contrast in (1) further shows that the distribution of bare NP subject in (1b) is not only less common but also severely restricted in canonical subject position, namely, Spec-T, in contrast to the bare NP object in (1a) in canonical object position. (1) a. Mary-ka Chelswu-(lul) manna-ss-e. Mary-Nom Chelswu-Acc meet-Past-Dec ‘Mary met Chelswu.’ b. Chelswu-lul Mary-*(ka) manna-ss-e. Chelswu-Acc Mary-Nom meet-Past-Dec ‘Chelswu, Mary met.’ It is plausible to assume that the subject Mary-ka in (1b) is “frozen” in the subject position, Spec-T, due to the scrambled object John-ul. Thus, (1b) sharply contrasts with (1a) in that Nominative Case must be marked unlike Accusative. * An earlier extended version of this study appeared in Ahn & Cho (2007a). This work was supported by the Konkuk University (the first author), and by the Brain Korea 21 Project (the corresponding author). Copyright 2007 by Hee-Don Ahn, and Sungeun Cho 57 Another subject-object asymmetry is D-linking restriction some non-Case-marked wh-phrases show. As initially noted by Ahn & Cho (2006), non-Case-marked subject wh-phrase nwukwu 'who' has only D(iscourse)-linked interpretation in the sense of Pesetsky (1987), as shown in (2). (2) a. Nwukwu-∅ Yenghi-lul manna-ss-ni? who Yenghi-Acc meet-Past-Q ‘Who is such that he/she met Yenghi?’ (only D-linked reading is possible) b. Nwu(kwu)-ka Yenghi-lul manna-ss-ni? who-Nom Yenghi-Acc meet-Past-Q 'Who met Yenghi?' (non-D-linked reading is also possible) However, such restriction isn’t observed in the case of bare object wh-phrases in (3). (3) a. Yenghi-ka nwukwu-∅ manna-ss-ni? Yenghi-Nom who meet-Past-Q (non-D-linked reading is also possible) b. Yenghi-ka nwukwu-lul manna-ss-ni? Yenghi-Nom who-Acc meet-Past-Q 'Who did Yenghi meet?' (non-D-linked reading is also possible) Interestingly, if the …

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