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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 25, No. 0, pp.1518-1537
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2025
Received 10 Oct 2025 Revised 06 Nov 2025 Accepted 14 Nov 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.25..202511.1518

Gendered Anaphoric Strategies in Korean: A Study on Male and Female Selection of BNPs and DNPs in Bridging Anaphora

Sang-Geun Lee ; Hoe Kyeung Kim
(First author) Professor, Department of English Language Education Korea University 145, Anam-ro, Seongbuk-gu Seoul, Korea, Tel: 02) 3290-2351 slee16@korea.ac.kr
(Corresponding author) Associate Professor Binghamton University, SUNY 4400 Vestal Parkway East PO Box 6000 Binghamton, New York 13902-6000, Tel: 607-777-4336 hoekim@binghamton.edu


© 2025 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study investigates how Korean speakers regulate anaphoric form selection across different task types, focusing on how gender interacts with discourse and processing demands. In Korean, an article-less language, speakers alternate between bare noun phrases (BNPs) and demonstrative noun phrases (DNPs) to maintain referential coherence in bridging contexts. Drawing on accessibility-based models of reference, 142 native speakers (89 females and 53 males) completed two complementary experiments: a naturalness rating task and a cloze production task. Both tasks manipulated discourse conditions defined by bridging relation (whole-part vs. product-producer) and subject marking (topic vs. nominative). The results revealed that apparent gender differences arose not from fixed communicative styles but from task-dependent modes of cognitive engagement. In the rating task, males showed greater modulation by discourse accessibility, reflecting an analytic and contrast-sensitive evaluative heuristic, while females applied more stable, consistency-based criteria of coherence. In the cloze task, the pattern shifted under real-time processing pressure. Females adjusted anaphoric explicitness more dynamically across contexts, whereas males maintained more stable, economy-oriented production. These findings demonstrate that what seems to be gender asymmetry in referential form selection actually reflects adaptive responses to the distinct cognitive and pragmatic demands of evaluation and production tasks, refining accessibility-based theories of reference and emphasizing the importance of task type in modeling discourse-sensitive anaphoric choice.

Keywords:

accessibility, anaphora, BNPs, bridging references, cloze task, DNPs, gendered language, rating task

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the College of Education, Korea University Grant in 2025. My sincere thanks go to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and to the participants whose involvement made this research possible.

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