Iconicity and Variation in the Choice of Object Forms in Korean

Abstract

The naturalness with which case ellipsis occurs in certain environments in Korean has been attributed to the information status and markedness of arguments, although few studies have compared the two factors explicitly. Through experimentation, the present study demonstrates that both factors simultaneously and independently influence object case ellipsis. The present study also provides a possible explanation of why case-marked and case-ellipsed objects are distributed the way they are by going beyond the mere descriptive level and looking at how the choice between the two variants is motivated by extra-linguistic, cognitive factors. In particular, we argue that the factors of focus, animacy, and definiteness can be linked to an iconic principle, which predicts the correlation between conceptual markedness and structural markedness. This general prediction is shown to be confirmed by the results of the experiment as well as corpus analyses.