The Editors’ Note

The current issue is the final installment for the current editorial team, which came on board with the December 2006 issue of the journal. At the time we were asked to serve, the idea of a five-year commitment for the editors and the editorial board was a new experiment in the long history of the journal. So was the idea of inviting scholars who are not affiliated administratively with the Language Education Institute (LEI) to serve as editor and associate editor of the journal. These initiatives were the result of the visionary foresight of the then director of the Institute, Professor Ki-Sun Hong, who sought to take a journal that has a sterling reputation and distinguished history among its readership in Korea to a new level of international visibility and competitiveness. As we hand over the reins to the next editorial team we feel that progress has been made toward that vision, though much work lies ahead. We are confident that the new editorial team will continue to work toward improving the reputation of the journal and to find a niche for it, and to continue to seek ways to facilitate the dissemination of the publications in the journal in an easily accessible electronic format

An Experimental Syntactic Study of Binding of Multiple Anaphors in Korean

In this paper we investigated the binding behavior of three Korean reflexives — caki, casin, and caki-casin — through a Truth Value Judgment Task with pictures and found that while caki and caki-casin pattern as claimed in the theoretical literature, as a long-distance and a local anaphor respectively, native Korean speakers differ in how they treat casin. While the speakers as a group treat casin as an LDA, individual results revealed a bimodal distribution, with one group of speakers consistently treating casin as an LDA and another, smaller, group consistently treating it as a local anaphor. This distribution is puzzling in that the grammar of speakers who treat casin as a strictly local anaphor appears to violate the cross-linguistic generalization that morphologically simple reflexives are long-distance anaphors. We show that this problem is only apparent, since the bare form casin lends itself to two different structural analyses. In addition, we show that the greater percentage of speakers who treat casin as an LDA reflects an ongoing change in the grammar of Korean, where casin is both increasing in frequency and taking on more longdistance antecedents. This assessment is supported by the sociolinguistic profiles of speakers we tested as well as the frequency and distribution of casin in Bible translations