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Bare Topics in Korean

It is known that there are two types of bare topics in Korean. One is a familiar bare topic appearing in the sentence-initial position, which is like a hanging topic or a dislocated element. The other is an unfamiliar bare topic appearing in the NP-initial position. Kim Y.-H. (1989) called the latter “constituent theme”, suggesting that it is a topic that its host NP is about, and claimed that it forms a constituent with its host NP. In this paper, we argue that, in fact, it does not. A piece of evidence is the fact that the so-called constituent theme can be separated from its host NP by an adjunct. Then, we claim that it is a clause-internal topic that the rest of the sentence following it is about. We also show that it is base-generated in a position between TP and vP.