Subject/object drop in the acquisition of Korean: A cross-linguistic comparison

Abstract

This paper discusses the subject/object drop pattern found in child Korean and makes a cross-linguistic comparison among seven languages. Regardless of their target languages, children acquiring any language are found to start producing fewer overt subjects than adult speakers. But their production of overt subjects increases with age and quickly reaches the adult rate. Since even children acquiring null-subject languages produce overt subjects at the early stages of acquisition less often than adults, there seem to be some nonsyntactic factors which are at least partly responsible across languages for the initial nonproduction of overt subjects. Moreover, the actual subject-drop rate in a language cannot be predicted on the basis of how the language identifies null subjects. For example, we cannot predict that a "rich-agreement" language drops subjects more often than a "discourse-oriented" language or the other way around. Children instead seem to show sensitivity to actual frequencies of subject drop in their target languages. Korean data also confirm the universal tendency of more frequent subject than object drop. The subject/object drop pattern in child Korean and a cross-linguistic comparison among seven languages support performance-limitation accounts of the subject drop phenomenon in early English. The findings are most consistent with Valians observation that early grammars show a high degree of sensitivity to characteristics of and frequency distributions in input.