Byung-Sun Park (National Chengchi University, Taiwan). 2010. A Study on Korean Subject Expression: A Suggestion for a New Methodology , Language Information . Volume 11. 83-94.
The purpose of this paper is to suggest new methodology for the Korean subject expression study. For this, I consider Korean subject actual expressions in the view of quantitative way and analyze the characteristic of those in the view of pragmatics. Especially, I focus on the Non-particle phenomena(Mu-josa) in the subject position on discourse-pragmatic level. I systematize the usage of the 'Mu-josa' through comparing with typical Korean subject particle form('i/ga', 'eun/neun' tagged) on the informational properties of the subject and the properties of the scene(the utterance scene). For this, I analyze the Sejong corpus(syntactic tagged corpus in Korean National Corpus) and the discourse data in the view of quantitative way. As a result, I found out that there are a lot of ellipses in the Korean subject position and that the 'Mu-josa' shows the property of the indication by the speaker in the utterance scene. And it also shows the utterance scene should be included in the 'Mu-josa' sentence. On the other hand, the typical subjective particle form 'i/ga' and 'eun/neun' have discourse-pragmatic meanings such as the 'emphasis' and the 'contrast' respectively which have no immediate connection with the utterance scene.
Key words: Subject, Korean, corpus, Korean teaching, particle(jo-sa), non-particle Mu-josa, subject ellipsis