‘What happened to the un-omitted subjects?’

Abstract This research examines variations of subject expression in spoken Korean. While much focus has been put on the omission of subjects in Korean as a pro-drop language, what is less explored is under what conditions choices are made into different forms when subjects are expressed, which in Korean includes not only pronouns but also kinship terms, professional titles, personal names and other lexical forms. In this paper, I test the distribution of subject expression in spoken Korean corpora for first and second person subjects and analyse the discursive aspects of the referential choices for the expressed subjects. The results confirm that first and second person subjects are expressed with varied referential forms and that relative age between discourse participants becomes a significant factor in the referential choice. This study also remarks on the importance of socio-cultural and pragmatic interpretation in the discussion of subject expression in Korean.