Parsing Empty Categories in Korean

Abstract

The Korean sentences involving empty subject(s) raise a serious Question of indetermination in parsing. The fact that such sentences are parsed without conscious processing difficulty suggests either no reanalysis is involved there or the reanalysis, if any, is automatic. Both possibilities are pursuable and the empirical coverage is satisfactory in both cases. For conceptual reasons, however, we pursue the possibility in which no reanalysis is assumed and a phrase structure permitting an empty category in the matrix subject position is posited. Considering the syntactic properties of Korean, to postulate such a structure is reasonable from the syntactic viewpoint as well as from the parsing perspective.