초록 열기/닫기 버튼

This article examines the variation displayed by believe-type verbs between the complement clause involving Raising-to-object (RtO) and the complement clause without raising in Korean. Through a corpus study on the distribution of the complement clauses of the verb sayngkakha- 'think', we demonstrate that the choice between the two types of complement clauses is strongly affected by the contrastiveness of the proposition expressed by those clauses. Going one step further, we also provide a possible explanation for why the two types of complement clauses are distributed the way they are. We propose that the pattern of complement choice observed in the corpus data reflects the speaker's attempt to balance between processing cost and discourse function. In particular, it is shown that the balance between processing cost and discourse function can correctly predict the gradient pattern of complement choice, while offering a unified explanation for the effect of contrastiveness on complement choice and the 'characteristic property' condition on RtO.