Zero Realization of Arguments Revisited

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper concerns itself with the constructions with null arguments. Much has been said as to the analysis of constructions with argument drop in so-called pro-drop languages such as Korean and Japanese. Even though researches have been revolving around the debate for or against pro/ellipsis analysis, given various examples that constitute the evidence for or against either approach, we are not specifically arguing for one single analysis. We admit that Korean is a radical pro drop language with such prevalent absence of arguments, but at the same time, despite a recent proposal against our claim (Ahn and Cho 2011, inter alia), we confirm the validity of our original position that ellipsis operation is
resorted to as an inevitable extra mechanism of grammar to explain some empirical phenomena found in restricted contexts involving reflexives, polarity sensitive items, indefinite DPs and free choice DPs. As for the specific mechanism to recover the contents of the null arguments, we propose LF (selective) feature copying, which has a major interpretive contribution to the recovery of the contents of the missing elements.