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Anaphoric definiteness marking in Korean: focusing on subject definites

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Abstract

This article takes a close look at subject anaphoric definites in Korean, with the goal of identifying (i) the distribution of anaphoric bare nouns and demonstrative-NPs and (ii) their form-meaning correlation. I show that the choice between an anaphoric bare noun and a demonstrative-NP is not as free as has been held in the literature (e.g., Ahn in THAT thesis: A competition mechanism for anaphoric expressions. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 2019; Simpson and Wu, in: Simpson, A (ed) New explorations in Chinese theoretical syntax: studies in honor of Yen-Hui Audrey Li. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 301–330, 2022; Park in Linguist Res 39(1):25–54, 2022). I capture their distributional and interpretive properties by proposing different semantics and syntax for them. I claim that demonstratives encode a locative relation between the speaker and the definite individual at issue and that demonstrative-NPs have a different distribution than anaphoric bare nouns because they carry what I call exophoric index as opposed to what I call endophoric index (compare Jenks in Linguist Inq 49(3):501–536, 2018; Ahn in THAT thesis: A competition mechanism for anaphoric expressions. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 2019; Dayal and Jiang in Linguist Inq 54(1):147–167, 2023). I further argue that demonstrative-NPs come with a presupposition, but their presupposition is not about anti-uniqueness (compare Simonenko in Grammatical ingredients of definiteness. Doctoral dissertation, McGill University, 2014; Dayal and Jiang in Linguist Inq 54(1):147–167, 2023). Moreover, I classify anaphoric bare nouns into two kinds, what I call situation-internally licensed definites, and what I call text-internally licensed quasi-names, additionally suggesting a new classification of anaphoric definites as well as other types of definites in Korean. This paper has implications for the syntax/semantics of indices, the semantics/syntax/pragmatics of weak definites and strong definites, and crosslinguistic variation in definiteness marking. It also provides evidence for the existence of a functional layer above NP in bare noun languages (compare Fukui in Engl Linguist 5:249–270, 1988; Bošković, in: Walkow, Elfner (eds) Proceedings of NELS 37. GLSA, Amherst, pp 101–114, 2008).

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Notes

  1. Schwarz (2009) builds on extensive literature before him, and this extensive literature includes, but is by no means limited to, works like Frege (1892), Russell (1905), Christophersen (1939), Strawson (1950), Hawkins (1978, 1991), Kamp (1981), Heim (1982, 1991), Kadmon (1990), Neale (1990), Kamp and Reyle (1993), Chierchia (1995), Lyons (1999), Roberts (2003), Elbourne (2005), and Wolter (2006).

  2. There are additional uses of definite descriptions than these, such as what are known as bridging (Clark 1975) or associative uses of definites (Hawkins 1978) and what Hawkins (1978) calls unfamiliar uses. For a fuller classification of definite descriptions and illustrative data, see Hawkins (1978), Lyons (1999), and Schwarz (2009, 2013).

  3. Classic examples of uniqueness-based analyses of definite descriptions are Frege (1892), Russell (1905), and Strawson (1950); and classic examples of familiarity-based analyses are Christophersen (1939) and Heim (1982).

  4. In this paper, I do not make terminological differentiations between unique versus weak definites and anaphoric versus familiar or strong definites until section 4, since doing so will not be directly relevant for our immediate purposes.

  5. But even in English, competition between the and demonstratives has been reported for some anaphoric/familiar/strong definite environments (see, e.g., Roberts 2002, 2003; Wolter 2006; Ahn 2019, 2022).

  6. In this paper, in presenting linguistic data taken from existing works, the original transcription and glossing method are retained unless otherwise indicated. In presenting new Korean data, Yale Romanization (Martin 1992) and the following abbreviations are used: acc: accusative; aux: auxiliary; clf: classifier; conn: connective; cop: copula; decl: declarative; hon: honorific; imp: imperative; imprf: imperfective; infml: informal; loc: locative; neg: negation; nom: nominative; prf: perfective/perfect; prs: present; pst: past; top: topic.

  7. That is, they are “salient members of the question under discussion (QUD)” (Jenks 2018: 525).

  8. Korean has three demonstratives, i (proximal), ku (neutral), and ce (distal). All three of them can be used deictically, but only i and ku can be used anaphorically. And when used anaphorically, i functions as a proximal demonstrative, and ku functions as a neutral or distal demonstrative (Sohn 1999: 210), so it can be glossed either as ‘the’ or ‘that’ (Cho 2022; cf. Ionin et al. 2012). Because ku is more commonly attested in anaphoric contexts, this paper presents data containing ku but essentially the same analysis can be applied to data containing i.

  9. Simpson and Wu (2022) also look at Hindi and Cantonese and show that Hindi behaves like Mandarin and Korean whereas Cantonese makes a formal distinction between unique definites and anaphoric/familiar definites, as has been well documented in the literature (e.g., Cheng and Sybesma 1999, 2005).

  10. I assume that anaphoric definites containing adjective phrases (APs) and relative clauses (RCs) form subcategories of anaphoric bare nouns, but in the interest of space, I do not include such data in this paper. For a similar categorization, see Sio (2006).

  11. Following standard practice in Korean linguistics, I treat the particle -nun and its allomorph -un as topic markers; however, exactly what ‘topic’ is and how it is formally marked is much debated in recent literature, not only for Korean but also for other languages (see, e.g., López 2009; Constant 2014; Kim 2015; Lee 2021; Park 2022; and references there). Given this, this paper will not define what ‘topic’ is. But it will nevertheless treat anaphoric definites marked by -nun/un in Korean as topics of some kind and show that they behave differently from those bearing a NOM-marker.

  12. Simpson and Wu (2022) show that the same pattern obtains for other syntactic positions such as direct object, indirect object, and adjunct positions; the interested reader is referred to the original source for such data.

  13. In (7), I have added the parentheses around the demonstrative ku, reflecting the authors’ remarks in the text. In addition, to control for any role that tense shift between the sentences may play, I have changed the first sentence’s tense to present and have taken the liberty to slightly modify the glosses.

  14. In the original source, the two sentences that appear in (8) are not given the (a) and the (b) labels; I have given them the alphabetic labels for ease of reference. Additionally, I have put parentheses around the demonstrative ku in (8b), reflecting the author’s comment in the footnote. Finally, for accuracy, I have glossed mwuchek in (8b) as ‘very’, rather than ‘more’, which is what Park (2022) glosses it as.

  15. The grammaticality judgments on the Korean data presented in this paper are based on 5-point Likert scale surveys conducted with eight native speakers of Korean, four male and four female whose ages range from 40 to 65. On the scale, 5 meant ‘perfectly grammatical or acceptable’; 4 meant ‘not perfect but acceptable’; 3 meant ‘not so good but not exactly outright ungrammatical either’; 2 meant ‘pretty bad or only marginally acceptable’; and 1 meant ‘absolutely ungrammatical or unacceptable’. The surveys were done in Korean using a survey form.

  16. Under Dayal and Jiang’s (2023) analysis, a demonstrative-NP may be unsuitable as the subject of (16b) because there may not be more than one dog in s′, i.e., a larger situation of s described by the sentence.

  17. According to Ahn (2019: 73), this principle “blocks an anaphoric expression β if there is α which is an anaphoric expression that is alternative to β for which the intension of the predicate applied to α (given the domain D and the assignment function g) entails the intension of the predicate applied to β”.

  18. Updating the semantic treatment she gave in Ahn 2019, Ahn (2022: 1386) argues that when the Korean demonstrative ku occurs modifying an anaphoric definite, it has the semantics of either (i) or (ii), where sup abbreviates the supremum operator, bi-sup abbreviates the binary supremum operator, and the value for x is partly determined by an anaphoric index. However, unlike the present analysis, these lexical entries do not encode a locative relation between the speaker and x. As we will see in sections 3.2 and 4, postulating the LR variable in the semantics of demonstratives given in (26) will be crucial in capturing the semantics and pragmatics of demonstrative-NPs, not only in Korean but also in other languages.

    (i)

    ⟦ku7⟧ = λF.sup[λx.entity(x) ∧ F(x)]

     

    presupposition: sup[λx.entity(x) ∧ F(x)] = g(7)

    (ii)

    ⟦ku⟧ = λF.λn.bi-sup[(λx.entity(x) ∧ F(x))(λx.x = g(n))]

  19. Depending on the theoretical assumptions one makes, there may be additional FPs above NP where adnominal modifiers (e.g., numerals, APs, RCs) merge, such as Sortal Phrase (SortP) and Unit Phrase (UnitP) (see, e.g., Svenonius 2008; Cinque 2010; Kim 2019).

  20. Löbner (1985: 298) also uses the term endophoric in a sense that is similar to the way I use it here, i.e., bearing a relation to the immediate minimal situation, or what I call sr. But he treats it as synonymous with cataphoric. Moreover, he explicitly differentiates it from anaphoric and deictic, whereas I use it as a subcategory of anaphoric which can also be a subcategory of deictic if one uses a weak definite situationally in the sense of Hawkins (1978). More on the relation between anaphoric definites and weak definites in section 4.

  21. Connection between emotivity and demonstrative use is well documented in English, though not all cases involve anaphoric environments (see, e.g., Lakoff 1974; Wolter 2006; Liberman 2008; Potts and Schwarz 2010; Acton and Potts 2014; Simonenko 2014; Kim 2018). In section 4, I briefly remark on how the present analysis may help explain such cases.

  22. When ku is used in (34b), the sentence implicates that the speaker is comparing the dog with some other animals that have not been introduced into the discourse.

  23. We can apply the same logic to contexts like (15): in (15), using a demonstrative-NP gives rise to pragmatic anomaly because there have already been two individuals introduced into the discourse in SA, meeting the presupposition of the comparative predicate, and there is no need for the speaker to encode a locative relation between them and the referent of the anaphoric definite at issue.

  24. If Kangaci in (35b) is replaced by a human name, e.g., Mina, the acceptability becomes lower, as shown in (i). This is because, given our world knowledge, comparing a human being with other animals with respect to the property of being cute when one is at a vet’s office is not so plausible. This shows that using just any proper name will not work in improving the grammaticality of (10b) when it is uttered as the continuation of (10a).

    (i)

    Context: Speaker has a female friend named Mina

     

    a.

    Tongmwul-pyengwon-eyse

    Mina-lul

    po-ass-ta.

      

    animal-hospital-loc

    Mina-acc

    see-pst-decl

      

    ‘I saw Mina at a/the veterinary hospital.’

     

    b.

    #Mina-ka

    kacang

    kwiyewu-ess-ta.

      

    Mina-nom

    most

    be.cute-pst-decl

      

    Intended: ‘Mina was the cutest.’

  25. But this does not mean that they are identical. Proper names are considered rigid designators (Kripke 1980) and therefore they are assumed to pick out the same object in all possible worlds; demonstrative-NPs will not. They pick out different individuals depending on context, let alone different worlds (see, e.g., King 2001; Roberts 2002, 2003).

  26. As an anonymous reviewer points out, in his investigation of Eastern Cham (Austronesian, Vietnam), Baclawski (2019) establishes a connection between a topic versus a focus status of a nominal, event tracking, and grammatical encoding of discourse relations via various mechanisms (e.g., indexing, nominal movement to the left periphery of clausal structure). I did not directly engage with his work here because the details of the phenomena he discusses are rather different from what we are concerned with in this paper. But he also notes that contrastive topics behave differently from non-contrastive topics, suggesting some potential affinity between Eastern Cham facts and Korean facts (see his chapters 2 and 5). For related and more detailed discussion on contrastive topics and their differences from non-contrastive topics, see Constant (2014).

  27. To take English, for example, whenever the narrator makes a comment on the content of the story in the middle of the narration, they tend to use demonstratives or what would be considered strong definite forms, e.g., I said to myself, this is it, as cited in Fabb (1997: 167).

  28. In the present analysis, the first occurrence of this dog and the second occurrence of this dog in (46a) refer to different individuals because the LR variables in their denotations receive different values from the discourse context.

  29. According to Simonenko and Carlier (2020), an NP-givenness grammar marks definiteness by using articles whereas a TP-givenness grammar does so by using information-structure driven “flexible” word order or prosody.

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Acknowledgments

This article has benefited greatly from the invaluable comments from the two anonymous reviewers of JEAL as well as the editors’ suggestions. Part of this work was also presented at KLCC 2021 at Cornell University, the Korean Linguistics Workshop at the University at Buffalo in 2021, the 2021 Fall Meeting of the Korean Generative Grammar Circle and the Korean Society of Language and Information, and TEAL-13 at National Taiwan Normal University. I would like to thank the audiences at these meetings, in particular Peter Sells, Shin-Sook Kim, Young-mee Yu Cho, Hailey Hyekyeong Ceong, Seungho Nam, and Lisa Cheng. I am indebted to Rint Sybesma for reading an earlier draft of this paper, providing constructive feedback, and to Suwon Yoon, EunHee Lee, and Soyoung Park for helpful discussion of some of the Korean data presented in this paper. I am solely responsible for any remaining errors.

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Kim, MJ. Anaphoric definiteness marking in Korean: focusing on subject definites. J East Asian Linguist 32, 373–409 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-023-09260-y

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