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Case-marked subjects in Korean have been shown to differ in a systematic way from their caseless counterparts as to their interpretation. This paper examines a hitherto unexplained property of caseless-subject clauses triggering a direct perception interpretation. I first present evidence from analyses of conversation data demonstrating that caseless subjects most productively occur in clause types with a subject that is identifiable in the here and now as an agent directly by the speaker and/or the hearer. Based on this evidence, I propose a new account of Differential Subject Marking (DSM) in terms of cue reliability, arguing that the association of caseless subjects with direct perception in the here and now, agentivity and tense deficiency follows from an economical use of formal particles motivated by reliability of semantic and situational cues for identifying an argument function and tense. These preliminary results support efficiency-based accounts of case marking and grammar (Hawkins 2004, Haspelmath 2008, Jaeger 2010, H. Lee 2010, 2016, Lestrade & de Hoop 2016, Levshina 2021).
