Emergence of Subjecthood: A Case from Null Subjects in Child Korean

摘要

This study examines the development of the production of modals and sensitivity to topic recoverability in two Korean monolingual children at several time points, ages 2;0 -3;0. The main findings of this study strongly suggest that at around 2;0 Korean children are able to distinguish old and new information, and drop or overtly report the subject accordingly, and also demonstrate a possibility that two-year-old Korean children gradually become sensitive to the connection between modal suffixes and the subjects that agree with them. It is proposed in this paper that subjecthood emerges as the child's communicative goals enrich initial language acquisition setting, and her development as a mind-reader and sensitivity to basic linguistic abstraction involving locality mature.