CONSTRAINTS ON CLAUSAL COMPLEX NOUN PHRASES IN KOREAN WITH FOCUS ON THE GAPLESS RELATIVE CLAUSE CONSTRUCTION BY JONG-YUL CHA

East Asian languages like Korean and Japanese are stocked with various types of clausal complex noun phrases. Among these phrase types, the gapless relative clause construction is exceptional in that there is no gap in the adnominal clause, unlike ordinary relative clause construction. The gapless relative clause construction is similar to noun complement clause construction syntactically because both constructions have no gap in the adnominal clause, but the gapless relative clause construction is different from the noun complement clause construction in the semantic and morphological respects. Therefore, it is difficult to determine to which construction the gapless relative construction belongs. This dissertation claims that the gapless relative clause construction is a subtype of relative clause construction, not of noun complement, because it shares many properties with the ordinary/gappy relative clause construction except for the existence of a gap. The gapless relative clause construction also has a unique semantic property that a cause and effect relation holds between the adnominal clause and the head noun