Incremental Parsing in Conditionals and Relative Clauses in Korean

Abstract

The strong head-finality of Korean raises many potential challenges to incremental parsing. In languages like Korean, there is normally no indication of clause structure before the parser encounters the verb or the relative head at the end of the clause. This uncertainty of clause structure can potentially give rise to processing difficulty of verbs in head-final languages. Developing our earlier studies in Japanese (Yoshida 2006), we present four series of experiments in Korean (offline and online) to show that there are, however, cases where the processing of clause-final verbs can indeed be predicted and facilitated.