The Relative Clause in Narrative Discourse

Abstract

This paper describes the relative clause structure of Korean in comparison with that of English and explores functions of the relative clause in narrative discourse. While English (an SVO language) has a prenominal relative clause with the relative pronoun strategy, Korean (an SOY language) has a prenominal relative clause with the deletion strategy. In both languages, the relative clause is found to provide background information about participants and props, cohesion in discourse, and minor or displaced events. However, there are also differences in function of the relative clause between the two languages, e.g. the use of the relative clause in English in introducing additional participants related to the one introduced as the head noun and that in Korean in encoding didactic material.