earticle

영어

This paper examines the free relative construction by comparing the role of relative pronouns in English, Chinese, and Korean. I advocate for the Comp Hypothesis, as opposed to the Head Hypothesis, which posits that the relative pronoun remains within the relative clause, CP, adjacent to its antecedent. Our findings suggest that an overt relative pronoun is required to be present at PF to construct free relatives in English. This relative pronoun merges with its generic antecedent to form a free relative via the ‘coalescence’ operation, which is then incorporated into the construction as an appropriate morphological item in the sense of Late Insertion. Naturally, this process precludes Chinese and Korean from manifesting comparable constructions due to the absence of overt relative pronouns in their grammar. It follows that the free relative construction operates differently in these languages, highlighting a significant cross-linguistic divergence in terms of coalescence as a crucial requisite for forming free relatives.