A Centering Dynamics Approach to Zero Pronouns in Korean*

Cognition 10.3, 57-73. This study examines 249 utterances from a corpus of newspaper articles, focusing on the distribution of zero subjects and zero objects. Two kinds of approach, centering theory in Grosz et al. (1995) and centering dynamics in Kameyama (1996, 1998), are compared to find out which approach is more general to explain the distribution of zeros in Korean texts. At first, this study analyzes the data based on centering theory in Grosz et al. (1995) and finds out that this approach is defective in two respects. One is that the occurrence of zeros is not only closely related with CONTINUE transitions but also fairly related with SMOOTH-SHIFT transitions. The other is that the occurrence of zero objects is not explained based on centering transitions. As an alternative approach, this study re-examines the distribution of zeros based on Kameyama's centering dynamics, and concludes that centering dynamics is more general in that it can cover the defects of centering theory. In addition, it is maintained that the distribution of zero objects can be explained based on the notion of Parallelism Preference. (Daeduk College) Key words: centering theory, centering dynamics, zero objects, parallelism preferenc