Discourse Sensitivity of Subjecthood Diagnostics in Korean: Experimental and Statistical Evidence from Obligatory Control and Reflexive Binding

The present study investigates crucial factors that influence on the interpretation of Subjecthood in Korean Multiple Subject Constructions (MSCs), especially concerning two selected diagnostics: Obligatory Control (OC) and Reflexive Binding (RB). The current study employed experiment using magnitude esti- mation (ME) tasks and statistical modeling (Random Forest analysis) to compare distinctive diagnostics. In addition, the study incorporated mini- discourse contexts to obtain more stable and context-based acceptability judgments, which can contribute to the validity of the two syntactic dia- gnostics. Seventy Korean native speakers were tested over the sentences representing OC and RB, constructed with 6 variables (i.e., sentence type, construction type, subject type, presence of diagnostic feature, possession type, animacy of NP). Overall results demonstrated the following: i) MSC sentences got significantly lower than non-MSC counterparts across both diagnostics; ii) Both OC and RB selected the Grammatical Subject (GS) more often than the Multiple Subject (MS); iii) OC was less sensitive to discourse context, whereas RB showed greater interpretive flexibility depending on contextual cues.