The Morphosyntax of Prenominal Relative Clauses in Korean

Abstract

This paper deals with an exceptional morphosyntactic phenomenon occurring in prenominal relative clauses in Korean and consequences caused by it. Korean relative clauses exhibit several morphosyntactic peculiarities; they cannot be an independent due to a missing sentence ending, and a tense affix and the adnominalizer, which is an outside element of IP, are collapsed and become an inseparable morphosyntactic entity. The latter is a rare instance violating the typical one feature-one affix pattern in Korean inflection. This paper will show that such a violation occurs as a result of eliminating a sentence ending in relative clauses in order to optimize a modifier clause. It further shows that it brings about an obligatory or optional appearance of -ten in relative clauses depending on their predicates. It represents not only the past tense but adds an aspectual sense such as noncontinuity or imperfectivity. The aspectual marking by -ten is a unique consequence of the morphosyntactic exception occurring in the IP structure of relative clauses. Finally, it will show that the morphosyntactic pattern of a certain agglutinative language determines the perfect clause versus the less than clausal form by comparing Korean and Japanese prenominal relative clauses.