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The purpose of this study is two-fold. One purpose was to examine thepattern of change over time in the production of null subjects, in topicrecoverability, and in subject-modal agreement in the speech of two Koreanchildren at several time points. A second purpose was to investigate whethertopic recoverability and verb modality relate to null subject use in Koreanchildren. While the major issue of this paper was change over time in child useof null subjects, I was also interested in looking into the development of theproduction of modals and sensitivity to topic recoverability, in light of the viewthat subject drop is potentially motivated by the grammatical and pragmaticconditions. For these purposes, it was hypothesized in this study that thefrequency of null subjects will increase with age in cases where the referentsare recoverable (old information) and predictable from the modals marked forparticular person. Main findings indicated that at around 2;0 Korean childrenwere able to distinguish old and new information, and drop or overtly reportthe subject accordingly. Our data also demonstrated a possibility that two-yearoldKorean children gradually became sensitive to the connection betweenmodal suffixes and the subjects that agree with them. Based on these findings, itis speculated that, along the lines suggested in Rispoli (1995, p. 345), Soracea etal. (2009), and Shin & Ecker (To appear in 2015), pragmatics on one hand, andspeech act and inflectional morphemes on the other, are possible informationsources for the construction of the relation between the meaning of predicatesand the discourse-pragmatic and syntactic roles encoded by a subject.
