An Experimental Syntactic Study of Korean Anaphor Binding: A case study of 'caki'

This study investigates the binding behavior of the Korean anaphor 'caki', which has been regarded thus far as a long-distance anaphor (LDA). Given that even local anaphors can be bound long-distance when they function as exempt anaphors in certain languages (Pollard and Sag 1992; Kim and Yoon 2009a, b), I investigated the binding behavior of LD-bound 'caki', in order to determine whether LD-bound 'caki' differs from LD-bound 'caki-casin' in the same contexts. In the experiment, subjects were required to rate the grammaticality of Korean sentences representing various types of LD binding of 'caki' and to determine whether the sloppy or the strict reading was more prominent in elliptical VPs containing the anaphor. The results are discussed with respect to the typology of LDAs proposed by Cole, Hermon and Huang (2001).