Korean Relativization

Abstract

There are almost as many definitions of relative clauses as there are writers on the subject. For this paper, I am taking the definition by de Rijk (1972), which combines both syntactic and semantic features. He defines a relative clause to be a "sentence modifying a noun phrase, such that the deep structure of the sentence contains a noun phrase identical to the noun phrase it modifies" (p.115). This definition tells us that, to be considered as a relative clause, a sentence must modify a noun phrase (NP), (this head noun can either precede or follow its modifying sentence depending on the language) and it must contain an NP coreferential to the head NP in the deep structure.