Two different categories of pronominal ku in Korean

Abstract

Contrary to the traditional view that a pronoun is uniformly a DP, recent approaches have shown that a pronoun is not syntactically uniform but is realized as different categories (e.g., Dechaine and Wiltschko 2002; Patel-Grosz and Grosz 2017). I show that the behavior of the 3rd person singular pronoun ku in Korean provides support for the non-uniform view. I propose that the pronoun ku instantiates two different categories, pro-DP and pro-ϕP, by building on the interpretational differences of ku. The pronoun ku is ambiguous having referential or bound variable reading similar to pro-DP or pro-ϕP in other languages such as German or Halkomemlem (Salish). This paper also examines two important characteristics of the proposed structure of the pronoun ku - its determiner use and a null NP- which has not been addressed in the previous studies on ku. The pronoun ku as pro-DP is used as a determiner when the NP is overt, as identified by the non-uniform approach. This paper shows that this is possible as the pronoun and determiner share the same structural core, namely indexP. As for a null NP in the structure of the pronoun, I propose that the ϕ head is a licensor of an NP ellipsis by providing evidence from the distribution of plural -tul. This paper contributes to the current debate on the syntactic and semantic similarities between pronouns and definite descriptions (e.g., Elborne 2005, 2008).