earticle

영어

This paper examined the syntactic properties of kes in Korean head-internal relative clause (HiRC) construction, which is regarded as a subtype of kes construction. While focusing on the grammatical characteristics of kes found in the HiRC construction, I argued against the previous analyses in which kes is treated as either complementizer or nominalizer. Instead, I suggested that kes can be analyzed as a pronominal, which is semantically associated with the semantic head of a HiRC. Base on the syntactic status of kes, I also proposed the internal structure of Korean HiRC construction in which the Korean HiRC is an NP-adjunction adjoined to kes, an external head of the relative clause. Under my proposed structure, kes is anaphoric in the sense that it is semantically linked to the semantic head of the HiRC. The definiteness effect of the HiRC construction can be captured by the feature [+def] dominated by D0 (i.e. a null head of DP), rather than kes or the semantic head of HiRC. My analysis of kes as an anaphoric pronominal has certain theoretical and empirical advantages. For example, it can account for the nominal properties of kes, which are not observed in any functional categories such as complementizer and nominalizer. And it can explain the semantic anaphoricity of kes well without provoking any theoretical problem.