Korean pro's: Not Topic Oriented

Abstract

This paper attempts to examine whether Korean is a topic oriented language, by scrutinizing the interpretational aspects of the celebrated phenomenon of null arguments in this language. We first show that the embedded null subject in Korean is evidently distinguished from its counterpart in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and Finnish where the embedded null subject is required to be bound by the closest c-commanding topic element. Assuming Abe's (2009) thesis that the null argument in Japanese loses a quantificational reading when it is c-commanded by its quantificational antecedent, we then investigate the interpretational features of the embedded null subject in Korean and show that the alleged null topic that binds the null (matrix/embedded) subject does not play any significant role in Korean grammar. In essence, this paper argues that the interpretational properties of null arguments in Korean point to the fact that this language is not topic oriented.