Different Types of Internally Headed Relative Clauses in Korean: A Corpus-based Analysis

Abstract

Internally Headed Relative Clauses have received much attention since the early days of generative grammar. This study primarily addresses whether the IHRCs in Korean are homogeneous or not. This study utilized the Sejong Spoken Corpus (i.e., transcription of naturally occurring speeches) to understand IHRCs with crucial reference to the discourse context (exploring 60,378 instances of relativization). The corpus exploration subclassifies the Korean IHRCs into three subtypes, using the replacement test (whether a common noun can be substituted for kes) and the among test (whether the internal head can co-occur with cwungey ‘among’). The first one is such that kes serves to link the internal head directly to the main predicate as a semantic dependent. The second one conveys a partitive interpretation so that kes means the subset or subpart of the entity associated with the internal head. The third one involves a change-of-status of the internal head and thereby kes refers to something resulting from the event described in IHRCs.