We claim in this paper that null arguments are a pronoun linked to a topic in their minimal CP domain. This claim is basically a unification of the following three existing proposals accounting for null argument phenomena: flexible null topic analysis that null arguments are bound by a flexible topic, pro analysis that they are a pronoun, and a proposal that pronouns are linked to CP edge. We show that this unified analysis nicely deals with distribution and interpretation of null arguments in Korean.

This paper assesses the last two-decade studies of null arguments in East Asian languages. Unlike the predecessors, these studies have concentrated lopsidedly on the distribution of null arguments in VP/TP ellipsis or anaphora contexts, thus hampering the proper identification of null arguments in these languages. Grounded on the observation that null arguments cannot be used as indefinites in radically pro-drop languages (Holmberg 2016), we go on to note that in non-ellipsis or non-anaphora contexts, null arguments in East Asian languages are either unique weak or anaphoric strong definites. Particularly, the latter use of null arguments sheds new lights on accounting for the long-standing puzzles such as Huang’s (1984) paradigm in Mandarin Chinese and Abe’s (2009, 2014) paradigm in Japanese, on top of the sundry distributions of null arguments in Korean. We suggest that null arguments in VP/TP ellipsis or anaphora contexts in East Asian languages can receive a proper analysis based on their syntactic identity in non-ellipsis or non-anaphora contexts.

It has been a common view in the literature since Yang (1984, 1988) that caki ‘self' is a long distance anaphor, subject to parameterizaton of the binding domain across languages. I suggest that caki ’self' is a local anaphor with a DP structure including pro. I also suggest that a null argument in Korean has a DP structure with pro, too, based on the wide range of similarities with caki ‘self.' The present proposal for caki ’self' and the null argument has a nontrivial theoretical implication for anaphors and null arguments in languages typologically akin to Korean.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature of null arguments in Korean. Even though many studies have been done to identify the null arguments, there seem to be some problems yet to be resolved in identifying them. The pro analysis of Ahn & Cho (2010, 2011a, 2011b, 2012) is likely to have wider explanative power than the DP ellipsis analysis because of the extensive uses of pro in Korean. Nevertheless, it is argued in this paper that the DP ellipsis analysis may be still applicable to constructions in which null arguments related to reflexives are missing.