Semantics of Korean gapless relative clause constructions
Jong-Yul Cha · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 1999
East Asian languages like Korean are stocked with various types of relative clause constructions, one of which can be formed without involving any syntactic gap in the adnominal clause.Though this 'gapless' relative clause construction is very similar to a noun com- plement clause construction both syntactically and morphologically, the two constructions are different in many semantic respects.The most important semantic property of gapless relative clause construc- tion is that a cause and effect or effect and cause relation always holds between the adnominal clause and the head noun.Also, there are some data suggesting that there exists an event variable in the ad- nominal clause of the gapless relative clause construction.It is this event variable that is bound by the head noun in place of a syntactic gap.This paper investigates various syntactic and semantic properties of Korean gapless relative clause construction and then seeks to arrive at the appropriate formulation of semantics of this construction, gener- alizing the formulation to ordinary relative clause constructions. 1.