Separating Licensing from Interpretation: A Reassessment of Korean Null Arguments

This paper reexamines the interpretive and distributional asymmetries between Korean null arguments and overt pronouns identified by Kang (2019). We argue that these asymmetries do not, by themselves, demonstrate that null arguments and overt pronouns have distinct grammatical representations. Such an inference conflates two independent dimensions of grammatical knowledge: omission licensing, which determines when an argument may remain unexpressed, and omission interpretation, which determines how an omitted argument is understood. Once these dimensions are distinguished, many apparent asymmetries can be explained by the interaction between grammatical constraints on omission and discourse-based interpretation. Interpretive preferences and distributional restrictions alone therefore cannot decisively distinguish among competing analyses of Korean null arguments. We conclude that the Korean facts are compatible with a pronoun-based (pro) analysis and support a broader methodological framework for evaluating null arguments.