Head-internal Relative Clauses in Korean: ‘Kes’ as an Overt Counterpart of a Null Argument

Abstract

This paper explores the phenomenon of head-internal relative clauses (HIRCs) in Korean. The existence of HIRCs in Korean has been a topic of intense debate in Korean linguistics, but this study builds upon the corpus findings of S.-K. Cho (2016) and J.-E. Lee (2020) to establish that HIRCs are indeed attested productively in Korean. By acknowledging their presence, this paper proposes a novel analysis that considers the use of ‘kes’ as an NP substitute anaphoric to the in-situ relative head within the HIRC. This analysis successfully captures the structural and interpretational characteristics unique to Korean HIRCs, distinguishing them from ordinary head-external relative clauses (HERCs). Specifically, the behavior of ‘kes’ in HERCs aligns structurally with null arguments in Korean, serving as both overt and covert anaphoric NPs. Interpretively, ‘kes’ in HIRCs refers to the referent affected by the event described by the HIRC. Overall, this analysis sheds lights on the nature of HIRCs in Korean, providing valuable insights into their syntactic and semantic properties.