What Restricts or Boosts the Use of Internally-Headed Relative Clauses in Korean

초록

Lee, Jieun; Kim, Say Young & Song, Sanghoun. (2023). What restricts or boosts the use of internally-headed relative clauses in Korean?. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 31(3), 113-137. This study examines what factors may restrict or boost the use of internally-headed relative clauses (IHRCs) in Korean. Although previous studies showed that the distribution of IHRCs in Korean is heavily restricted, Korean IHRCs are found in naturally occurring data. To understand the factors that suppress or boost the use of IHRCs, this study focused on the effect of the construction that is functionally similar to IHRCs on the one hand, and the constructions that are structurally similar to IHRCs on the other hand. Specifically, the influence of these factors was tested with a structural priming task. The task was performed using a PowerPoint Presentation and fifty-five native Korean speakers participated in this task. The results showed that the use of IHRCs can be curtailed by externally- headed relative clauses (EHRCs), which are functionally similar to IHRCs. In addition to this, the use of IHRCs can be boosted by structurally similar perception verb constructions and complement clauses. This case study shows how similarity affects the use of low-frequent constructions like IHRCs in Korean and offers new perspectives for studying their limited distribution.

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