A Review on Zero Anaphora Resolution Theories in Korean

This paper briefly overviews, criticizes and evaluates two major theories of contemporary semantic and/or pragmatic endeavors to resolve the referential indeterminacy of zero anaphors in Korean. It is pointed out that Lee’s (2002) proposal to extend Asher’s (1993) SDRT framework to incorporate a series of contextual information provides a rather limited treatment of the interaction between different types of speech acts and the participant-oriented zero pronouns and needs further refinement to deal with the referential indeterminacy in general. The paper also critically reviews the information structure approaches based on Grosz et. al.’s (1995) Centering Theory and Vallduvi’s (1994) Information Packaging Theory and points out that they have to come up with a system that can properly deal with the issues surrounding the hierarchy of forward looking centers, the conflict between world knowledge and center establishment, the preference ordering among transition patterns, and the syntactic analysis and placement of zero-topicality in Korean.