Reflexive Binding and Adjunct Control as Subject Diagnostics in Korean: An Experimental Approach

Abstract

What makes a subject has been one of the hottest topics in Korean syntax, and several diagnostics have been proposed. Among the diagnostics, the current study chose two tests and experimentally investigated how they worked in single subject constructions (Non-MSCs) and multiple subject constructions (MSCs). The diagnostics examined in this study were Reflexive Binding (RB) and Adjunct Control (AC). An experiment was designed to test how these two subjecthood diagnostics applied to the Non-MSC and MSC environments. The intuition of seventy Korean native speakers was tested with magnitude estimation. The test items were composed of 80 Korean sentences which represented different subjecthood properties in Non-MSCs and MSCs. The analysis results show that (1) both RB and AC can be used as subjecthood diagnostic tests in the Non-MSC environment, but (2) that only RB can be used as a subjecthood diagnostic test in the MSC environment. (Chungnam National University.Seoul National University.Soongsil University)