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Cue reliability, communicative efficiency, and differential subject marking: Evidence from Korean

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Hanjung Lee
Hanjung Lee*
Affiliation:
Sungkyunkwan University
*
Department of English Language and Literature, Sungkyunkwan University, 25-2 Sungkyunkwan-ro, Jongro-ku, Seoul 03063, Korea, [hanjung@skku.edu]
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Abstract

This article investigates the role of situational context in differential case marking. Evidence from conversation data in Korean demonstrates that caseless subjects are predominantly found in event-reporting clauses that have an agent directly identifiable in the here and now, while case-marked subjects are not similarly restricted. Based on this evidence, I propose a new account of differential subject marking in terms of an efficiency principle of negative correlation between length/complexity and cue reliability. I argue that the association of caseless subjects with seemingly unrelated features such as grounding in the here and now, nonstativity, and definiteness follows from speakers' efficient use of case marking motivated by the availability of strong situational cues to the intended role interpretation of a subject referent.

Keywords

communicative efficiencycue reliabilitydifferential subject markinggrounding in the here and nowtensestativityKorean

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 100 , Issue 3 , September 2024 , pp. 468 - 503
Copyright
Copyright © 2024 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This article builds on and develops earlier work presented at the 22nd Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar (August 2020), the Workshop on Data-oriented Approaches to Meaning in Korean and Japanese (October 2021), the 36th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (October 2022), and the 2023 LSK Summer Conference (August 2023). I thank the audiences at all presentations for their helpful comments and discussions. I am particularly grateful to Hee-Rahk Chae, Helen de Hoop, Jungmee Lee, Myung-Kwan Park, Shiao-Wei Tham, and Yusuke Kubota for their useful feedback and suggestions while this work was in progress. I also owe special thanks to anonymous Language referees and the editors Andries Coetzee, Shelome Gooden, and Ruth Kramer, who gave demanding but supportive feedback all along the way. It goes without saying that all inadequacies and errors are entirely my own. This work was supported in part by a grant from the Ministry of Education and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF2023S1A5A2A01074277).

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