The Korean Internally-Headed Relative Clause Construction: Its Morphological, Syntactic and Semantic Aspects

This dissertation investigates the morpho-syntactic and semantic aspects of the Korean IHRC (internally-headed relative clause) construction, which has its semantic head within the relative clause, the relative clause being followed by the morpheme kes.As for the status of kes, I argue it is a pronoun, positioned under D or N, depending on whether kes stands alone or is modified by a demonstrative. In either case, the IHRC receives the same semantic interpretation as non-restrictive relative clause.I argue the relative clause contains a full clause including TP, exhibiting a full range of tense and aspect distinction. I provide a morphological analysis of the IHRC predicate, identifying the contribution of each morpheme, and its status with respect to the root predicate.I adopt phase theory to explain the fact that the internal head cannot be embedded within more than one phase boundary. An uninterpretable feature on C in the relative clause is checked against a matching interpretable feature on the internal head--DP or the event of vP--, and the index of the internal head thus percolates up to CP. The modified pro has the same index as the CP and the internal head. An interesting syntactic contrast between kes as D and kes as N is that an island effect emerges in the latter case. This is explained by adopting Johnson (2004)'s account of adjunct islands. When kes is a D, the relative clause is the same workspace as the matrix clause, while kes is an N, the relative clause is the separate workspace.For the semantic aspects of the IHRC, I noted when the semantic head is ambiguous between the subject and another element in the embedded clause, the subject is always favored as a semantic head. This phenomenon can be explained by the minimal link condition: the subject is the closest position to check the uninterpretable feature on C, adapting Lin (2006). Also, split-antecedent readings and VP adjunct head readings are coercion effects of event-interruption reading produced in certain circumstances between the matrix event and the embedded event