earticle

영어

Research on production preferences in languages has revealed that animacy-based accessibility plays a crucial role in determining the choice of passive sentence in relative structures. English speakers, for instance, show a tendency to produce more passive sentences with animate head nouns than inanimate head ones. This tendency, however, is reduced in Spanish, and even more so in Serbian. This paper examines structure choice in relative clause production of Korean, which is similar to Spanish and Serbian with respect to the systematic syntactic function marking, and to Japanese with respect to SOV basic word order, and shows how language specific constraints interact with production mechanisms in producing complex structures. It turns out, in fact, that animacy based accessibility is not necessarily equated with subject function in languages other than English. Rather, the preference of object case deletion over subject case is claimed to play a prominent role in determining active relative clauses in Korean.