Topic Acceptability Scale and Topic Constructions in Korean

Abstract

Based on two cognitive categories, activation and identifiability, Lambrecht (1994) distinguishes four different types of discourse referents, i.e. active, accessible, inactive, unidentifiable, which represent different mental representation of those referents in the minds of the speaker and addressee, and he suggests the topic acceptability scale, which states that there is a general correlation between the activation and identifiability states of topic referents and the pragmatic acceptability of sentences. According to the scale, the most easily acceptable sentences are those whose topics are active since the mental cost to process active topics is low, and the degree of acceptability decreases in the following order: accessible, inactive and unidentifiable topics. In fact, unidentifiable referents cannot be topics since it is impossible because the addressee has to interpret the proposition of a sentence which is about something he cannot even identify. The main purpose of this paper is to show how topics in different activation/identifiability states are expressed in Korean, and it is shown that topic referents belonging to different activation/ identifiability states adopt different strategies to be expressed as topics. Active topics, which are assumed to be the most easily accepted, are generally expressed as zero pronouns and bare NPs, which requires the minimum amount of mental cost to process them. Accessible referents, which are frequently used as topics in Korean, show that they need the marker -nun to be expressed as topic. Finally, Korean uses the marker -nun or the maliya construction to encode inactive topics.