Abstract

This paper reviews and critically discusses some widely believed but not entirely evidenced arguments for the so-called Internally-Headed Relative Clauses (IHRCs) in Korean. We deal with two highly controversial issues: the definition issue and the validation issue of the most believed grammatical peculiarities of IHRCs in Korean. We first deal with the previous attempts to define IHRCs in Korean, showing that they fail to differentiate IHRCs from other relative clauses. Furthermore, we show that, contrary to the definition of the relative clauses, IHRCs are neither subordinate clauses nor nominalized sentences in Korean. In addition, we show that the overtness of the pivot element cannot be maintained. We then critically discuss the issue of whether the mostly assumed grammatical peculiarities of the Korean IHRCs get empirically supported by a set of new data. Finally, we dispute widely assumed properties of IHRCs in Korean such as gaplessness, unbounded dependencies, the identity of truth-conditional meaning between IHRCs and Externally-Headed Relative Clauses (EHRCs), and non-restrictive interpretation with maximality effects. .

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