Long-distance bound local anaphors in Korean—An empirical study of the Korean anaphor caki-casin

Abstract

In this paper we argue that the Korean anaphor caki-casin, taken thus far to be a local anaphor, can be bound long-distance in certain cases as an exempt anaphor. We make this argument on the basis of an experimental study where the subjects were asked to judge the grammaticality of sentences with long-distance bound caki-casin and to choose between the strict and sloppy readings in contexts of ellipsis/proform. A majority of subjects accepted long-distance bound caki-casin and preferred strict readings, indicating that long-distance bound caki-casin is behaving as an exempt anaphor. Speakers who accepted sentences with long-distance bound caki-casin were sensitive to logophoric factors that are known to influence exempt binding. These results imply that the core vs. exempt binding distinction (Pollard and Sag, 1992, 1994; Reinhart and Reuland, 1993) exists even in languages like Korean with a rich inventory of anaphors—local and long-distance—suggesting that the core-exempt dichotomy is orthogonal to the local vs. long-distance property of anaphors (Cole et al., 2001; Huang and Liu, 2001). More generally, the results indicate that both grammar and the interfaces are involved in anaphor binding.