The aim of this paper was to examine the knowledge of Korean students about English relative clauses in both contextualized and decontextualized situations. To this end, a study was conducted in which fifty college students of EFL participated as subjects, and data were collected by means of three methods: elicited imitation task, composition and conversation. The findings of the study indicated that subjects’ performance on comprehension and production tasks was affected by grammatical positions on which relativization occurs in relative clause. It was also shown that their performance was influenced by position of head noun in matrix clause that relative clause modifies. Based on the results of the study, two sets of ordering (i.e., the accuracy order of comprehension and the frequency order of production) in which a variety of types of relative clauses were understood and used in contextualized and decontextualized situations were offered to describe and explain the Korean learners’ performance on L2 relative clauses.

This study examined processing of L2 English relative clauses by testing the Filler-Gap Hypothesis (Hawkins, 1999; O"Grady 1997). For that goal, we partially replicated Diessel and Tomasello (2004), who examined L1 acquisition of relative clauses by English-and German-speaking children. The Filler-Gap Hypothesis states that the structural distance between head and gap determines the processing difficulty pertained within relative clauses. Taking this hypothesis as a theoretical starting-point, we used an elicited imitation task to tap 48 L2 learners" knowledge of English relative clauses. The results of the study demonstrated that subject relatives retained greater accuracy scores than object relatives, which in turn retained greater accuracy scores than indirect object and oblique relatives. These results were largely consistent with the predictions made by the FGH, but only partially consistent with Diessel and Tomasello"s L1 data.

This paper investigates Korean learners' comprehension pattern of English relative clauses. Also Korean learners' general principle for interpretation of English complex sentences as L2 is discussed. Though, for the native speakers' general principle, Conjoined-clause strategy, Left-to-Right strategy and Functional Principle are argued in linguistic literatures, none of them is fully supported by Korean learners' data. Thirty High School students and sixty college students were tested in the experimental tests. As the results of de Villiers et al.(1979), Korean adult learners have shown the order of comprehension, as SS > OO > OS > SO type, and the number of possible candidates of the gap in relative clauses, not just the distance, has made them difficult to comprehend. To see the distribution of the relative clauses in Korean textbooks, I have investigated two High School textbooks. Both the amount and the diversity of relative clause types seem not to reflect Korean learners' developmental process properly.

In this paper I argue that the so-called gapless relative clause (GRC) in Korean actually has a syntactic gap, and thus, it is a variant of the externally headed regular gappy RC. I also argue that the surface structure of GRC is derived from the underlying structure where the cause-effect relation required in GRC constructions is fully realized via pragmatically conditioned ellipsis. Thus I suggest that the verbal effect part can be ellipted to the extent that this part is pragmatically recoverable in the presence of the head noun that denotes the same effect. The categorial status of the GRC is further claimed to be CP, which then hosts operator movement in its Spec in a usual way. So there is little anomaly in the RCs known as gapless RCs.

Resumptive pronouns in English are found in relative constructions where gaps are supposed to take the place. If a construction has two or more forms in free variation from the point of view of truth-conditional semantics, it is worthwhile investigating whether there are pragmatic differences. Based on Prince (1990, 1995)’s observations, we will show the pragmatic meaning difference between the gap-containing structure and the pronoun-containing structure. We will also show that the reconstruction based on movement theory does not suffice to explain the distribution. Then we will suggest that resumption is the last resort strategy at PF which needs reference-set computation against the suggestion of Aoun, Choueiri & Hornstein (2001) which is based on Binding. In the following chapter, many instances of resumptive pronouns will be presented, showing that there is not insignificant meaning difference between the gap-containing structure and the pronoun-containing structure. In chapter 2, the proposals of reconstruction will be critically surveyed. In chapter 3, the resumption as the last resort strategy will be suggested. Chapter 4 concludes the paper.

Acquisition of relative clauses in Korean and Japanese has been one of the fruitful research topics in the modern linguistics. Kim (1987) and Lee (1991) especially have revealed many interesting aspects of the acquisition of relative clauses, especially the relative clauses in Korean. They claim that so-called externally-headed relative clause constructions are acquired earlier than the internally-headed relative clauses in Korean. Contrary to what Kim (1987) and Lee (1991) claim, Cho (1999, 2003) proposes an alternative such that the internally-head relative clauses (IHRCs) in Korean are acquired earlier than the externally-headed ones (EHRCs). If this is the case, then why? Cho (2003) simply remarks that children tend to acquire structures that are easy to understand earlier than those that are not. We will critically re-examine this claim and provide some explanation. That is, we show that IHRCs are acquired earlier than EHRCs because the former are semantically more transparent than the latter, while having the same syntactic structures.

Lee, Soo-Jae. 1999. Interpreting and Processing Null Arguments in Korean Relative Clauses. Studies in Modern Grammar 15, 55-78. In interpreting and processing relative clauses in many languages the issue has been which element is relativised, a subject or an object. For instance, experimental evidence shows that it is easier to process the relative clause in which a subject is relativised rather than an object. In processing Korean relative clauses with two null arguments the issue is how to resolve the ambiguity of the two logically possible interpretations: either null subjects are coreferential with matrix subjects and null objects are relativised or null objects are coreferential with matrix subjects and null subjects are relativised. By providing various cues I will demonstrate that Huang`s claim that null objects cannot be coreferential with matrix subjects cannot be supported in Korean. In Korean (though not in Chinese) null objects in relative clauses are very flexible in interpretation.