The Bindability of Korean Pronouns: An Experimental Study
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This study investigates whether the Korean third-person pronoun ku ‘he’ can be interpreted as a bound variable, a question that has produced long-standing disagreement in the literature. Whereas Kim & Han (2016) attribute the split in judgments regarding the bindability of ku to inter-speaker grammatical variation, Hara (2000) argues that similar variability with Japanese kare reflects a pragmatic/discourse constraint on antecedent specificity. To evaluate these competing hypotheses, the present study employed two truth-value judgment task experiments. Experiment 1 replicates the bimodal response pattern reported by Kim & Han (2016) when ku is linked to the bare quantifier motwu ‘everyone’. Experiment 2 shows that this variability is eliminated once the quantificational antecedent is made linguistically more specific. Specifically, when modified by a relative clause, ku receives uniformly high acceptance under a bound-variable interpretation. These findings indicate that ku is grammatically bindable but subject to a specificity-based licensing condition, supporting a unified grammar rather than a split-grammar account. More broadly, the results align Korean with Japanese in revealing the sensitivity of East Asian third-person pronouns to pragmatic/discourse-based constraints on quantificational binding.
Abstract
This study investigates whether the Korean third-person pronoun ku ‘he’ can be interpreted as a bound variable, a question that has produced long-standing disagreement in the literature. Whereas Kim & Han (2016) attribute the split in judgments regarding the bindability of ku to inter-speaker grammatical variation, Hara (2000) argues that similar variability with Japanese kare reflects a pragmatic/discourse constraint on antecedent specificity. To evaluate these competing hypotheses, the present study employed two truth-value judgment task experiments. Experiment 1 replicates the bimodal response pattern reported by Kim & Han (2016) when ku is linked to the bare quantifier motwu ‘everyone’. Experiment 2 shows that this variability is eliminated once the quantificational antecedent is made linguistically more specific. Specifically, when modified by a relative clause, ku receives uniformly high acceptance under a bound-variable interpretation. These findings indicate that ku is grammatically bindable but subject to a specificity-based licensing condition, supporting a unified grammar rather than a split-grammar account. More broadly, the results align Korean with Japanese in revealing the sensitivity of East Asian third-person pronouns to pragmatic/discourse-based constraints on quantificational binding.