Over the past few decades, a lot of research has been conducted on what factors influence the choice of Figure and Ground in the description of a situation, e.g., Talmy (1983, 2000) and Langacker (1991) among others. However, the choice of Figure and Ground is very subtle in that both the objective properties of the entities and the subjective perspective or attention of the speaker interact with each other. Specifically, little has been said to provide a unified understanding of different syntactic and semantic structures which deal with the same situation, involving Figure and Ground relation. For this reason, this paper aims to elaborate the possible elements which govern the choice of Figure and Ground in a given sentence and account for various syntactic and semantic structures in terms of Figure and Ground organization. These include Figure-Ground reversal by means of (a-)symmetric relation, active and passive voice, lexicalization patterns, crosslinguistic difference between English and Korean, semantic roles, selectional restrictions, and discourse.

• Sung Chool Im