체코어와 한국어의 공주어(空主語) 현상에 대한 실험적 고찰

A tentative approach to null Subjects between Czech and Korean

The ultimate goal of this paper is to provide the syntactic and pragmatic typology of the null subjects between Czech and Korean. The phenomenon of null subjects is assumed to resolve a major problem in developing a natural language understanding system for both languages. With respect to the fact that Czech and Korean are well known as pro-drop languages, it is basically postulated that a pronoun can be dropped if its content can be recovered at two levels: the sentence level and the discourse level. In this regard, this paper focuses on the question of how pro-drop can be licensed in these languages. I propose that recoverability of Czech pro is subject to both an elaborated system of verbal agreement and a Functional Sentence Perspective, while Korean pro is recovered mainly through the contextual information or the context-related apparatus. This paper, however, fails to discuss the crucial question as to why Korean permits null subjects in a wider range than Czech does, even though the former lacks the nominal features, commonly called -features. Instead, it provides a typological information based on the cross-syntactic variation between Czech and Korean, shown in Table 4. Finally, I expect that the observation of this paper would serve a particular person who is engaged in teaching Korean to Native Czech.