丁香园AV

Congratulations to Dr. Kyeong-min Kim, who successfully defended his dissertation on December 20, 2018! Kyeong-min Kim joined the department in Fall 2011 and has since worked under Dr. Chung-hye Han and Dr. Keir Moulton in the Xsyn Lab.

Here are some of Kyeong-min's contributions while at 丁香园AV.

• Han, Chung-hye, Dennis Storoshenko, Betty Leung, and Kyeong-min Kim . Subject and predicate effects on long distance anaphor Caki in Korean. .  MIT, October 11-13, 2013.    

• Kim, Kyeong-min. Korean third-person pronouns and bound variable anaphora: An experimental Study. . 丁香园AV, Canada, June 18, 2014.

• Kim, Kyeong-min, and Chung-hye Han. 2016. Inter-speaker variation in Korean pronouns. In Patrick Grosz and Pritty Patel-Grosz (eds.), The Impact of Pronominal Form on Interpretation, 349-373. Studies in Generative Grammar [SGG] 125. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

PhD Thesis Defence
Korean Anaphora: An Experimental Investigation

This dissertation explores the syntactic and interpretative properties of three Korean anaphoric
devices, (i) third-person pronouns, (ii) VP anaphors (VPAs), and (iii) null objects (NOs), using
experimental syntax methodologies.

There is no general consensus among previous studies as to whether Korean third-person pro-
noun ku 鈥榟e鈥� (and its feminine counterpart kunye 鈥榮he鈥�) can be construed as a bound variable (Hong
1985, M. Y. Kang 1988, Suh 1990, N. K. Kang 2000, Koak 2008). Three interconnected experi-
ments were conducted to investigate this issue, and the 铿乶dings demonstrated that some speakers
of Korean consistently accepted the quanti铿乧ational binding of ku , while others consistently did
not. This result is highly suggestive of an existence of inter-speaker variation in the bound variable
construal for ku . Taking into consideration the historical background of ku and its present status,
I conclude that child learners of Korean may not receive suf铿乧ient evidence regarding ku from the
primary language input data. Given this, adopting Han et al.鈥檚 (2007) two-grammar hypothesis and
D麓echaineandWiltschko鈥檚 (2002) pronominal typology, I propose that some speakers of Korean
randomly acquire FP ku , which complies with the 鈥減ronominal grammar鈥�, while other speakers of
Korean acquire DP ku , which complies with the 鈥渄emonstrative grammar鈥�.

On the basis of the 铿乶ding that there is variation across Korean speakers in the quanti铿乧ational
binding of ku (i.e., the bound variable construal for ku ), the present study investigates the syntax
of VPAs and NOs in Korean. The existing proposals on their syntactic identities can be grouped
into two ways, the ellipsis approaches (Cho 1996, S. W. Kim 1999, Ha 2010, J. S. Kim 2012) and
the pro-form approaches (Yoon 2004, Ahn & Cho 2010, Bae & Kim 2012, M. K. Park 2013). In
two independent experiments designed to diagnose the presence of 鈥渉idden鈥� structure within VPAs
and NOs, I examined the (un)availability of sloppy readings for VPAs and NOs with antecedents
containing ku . Given the standard view that the sloppy reading in ellipsis is due to a pronoun in
the ellipsis site being bound (Sag 1976, Williams 1977), if VPAs or NOs have elided structure that
hosts ku , the distribution of sloppy readings for them should correlate with that of quanti铿乧ational
binding of ku . Such a correlation, however, is not expected if they are pro-forms that do not host
elided material (and thus not ku ). The correlation was found in the experiment for NOs, but not
in the experiment for VPAs. Based on these 铿乶dings, I claim that VPAs are atomic, un-analyzable
pro-forms, which thus have no more structure than what must be present for the surface lexical
string, while NOs are derived from ellipsis, anaphora that have a fully-铿俥dged structure.