One of the long established characteristics of languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean is their context dependence; or to put it in Li & Thompson's (1976) terminology, their "topic-orientedness". Unlike other pro-drop languages (e.g., those in the Romance family) empty pronouns in East Asian languages are licensed not by strong agreement but their ability to be identified via strong contextual/discourse features. On a different note, these languages consistently exhibit long-distance anaphoric patterns (ziji in Chinese, zibun in Japanese, and caki in Korean). The relevance of contextual factors in accounting for long-distance anaphora has also been repeatedly stressed in the literature in various forms (perspective, logophoricity, point of view - just to name a few).In this paper I will concentrate on the binding properties of Korean Caki. I will endeavour to show that one can make do without reference to "contextual" antecedents whose binding domains are, almost by definition, rather obscure and unconstrained, by postulating the existence of a topic (overt or null) as part of the standard clausal architecture of Korean sentences, thereby reducing the long-distance, context-controlled binding instances to a more formal and syntactically constrained mechanism. The ramifications and problematic aspects of the proposal will be addressed at the end of the paper.
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