Song, J. 1 , Koo, J. . 1 & Yun, H. 2
1 Seoul National University (Dept. of English Language and Literature, PhD student)
2 Gachon University (Research Center for Liberal Arts and Science, Senior Researcher)
This study aimed to show that PRO in control sentences in Korean is anticipatorily and locally processed. Having control-inducing markers in embedded clauses, we investigated 1) whether readers determine referents of PRO immediately at encountering control-inducing markers before clause-final control verbs, 2) which preverbal argument readers favor to select as a potential referent of PRO. In our study, subject-bias control (SC) verbs and object-bias control (OC) verbs were paired with three types of control markers (i.e., control-neutral marker '-kes', SC-inducing marker '-keyss', and OC-inducing marker '-la'). The control makers were matched or mismatched to upcoming control verbs depending on which verb type followed. Our results revealed that 1) rejections obtained from a stop-making-sense task significantly began increasing at control verbs, at the earliest moment when the implausibility of control verbs could be detected, and 2) rejections were produced more when SC-inducing markers, rather than OC-inducing markers, were mismatched with control verbs. Moreover, readers' favors for OC verbs appeared when control-neutral markers ambiguously cued to the referents of PRO. Taken together, we claimed that it is preverbal control-inducing markers that anticipatorily lead to the understanding of control relations and that readers' preference for the reference resolution of PRO is locally dependent.