The Argument Structure of Relational Nouns and Inalienable Possessor Constructions in Korean

Abstract

This paper deals with the argument structure of some nouns which are called "relational nouns" or "inalienable possession nouns" in the literature. The prototypical instances of these nouns are kinship nouns such as father, sister, bodypart nouns such as hand, face, and partwhole nouns such as inside, bottom. In this paper, I examine various syntactic and semantic properties of constructions where relational nouns such as son 'hand' and emeni 'mother' appear in Korean and show that the hypothesis that relational nouns possess a-structure is crucial to explaining them. Specifically, I examine the properties of two types of Inalienable Possessor Constructions in Korean, i.e., the Internal Inalienable Possessor construction where the argument of a relational noun is realized as a prenominal genitive possessor to the relational noun and the External Inalienable Possessor construction, also known as the Multiple Object Construction, where the argument of a relational noun is realized as an additional object external to the projection of the relational noun.