Argument ellipsis vs. V-stranding VP ellipsis in Korean:

This paper revisits null arguments in Korean (and Japanese) by observing an interesting set of data involving disjunction. Recently, Sakamoto (2013) proposed a new diagnosis for ellipsis, which is a disjunctive reading obtained from the gap of disjoined NPs. With this newly proposed diagnosis for ellipsis, it is confirmed that ellipsis IS required in pro-drop languages such as Korean and Japanese (J/K). In addition, although a current line of analyses of null arguments in Korean are argument ellipsis (AE) vs. pro, it turns out that some data still constitute strong evidence for verb-stranding VP ellipsis (VVPE) (cf. Gribanova 2013). This observation is significant since Korean has been classified as one of the languages without the VVPE strategy in an extensive cross-linguistic study by Goldberg (2005). On close scrutiny of a novel set of relevant data, this paper newly proposes that Korean has both AE and VVPE.