Kang, Soyeon. 2014. The Role of Syntactic and Semantic Information in the Frequency Distribution of Relative Clauses in Korean: A Corpus-based Analysis. Language Information. Volume 19. 05-32. The study investigated the constructional frequency of Korean relative clauses, focusing on the use of syntactic and semantic information in their production. The study investigated the constructional frequency of Korean relative clauses, focusing on the use of syntactic and semantic information in their production. A corpus study was conducted by automatically extracting all kinds of Korean head-external relative clauses through Perl programming from the Sejong Korean Parsed Written Corpus. The distributional frequency of the Korean relative clauses was analyzed in terms of syntactic information (grammatical functions of head NPs) and semantic information (animacy of heads and NPs within RCs). The results show that (a) Korean relative clauses are produced in order of subject > direct object > indirect object / oblique > genitive; (b) there is a correlation of subject relative clauses with animate heads and object relative clauses with inanimate heads; (c) the effect of syntactic information is more powerful when heads and NPs within RCs do not differ in animacy, whereas the effect of semantic information is more powerful when the two NPs differ in animacy; and (d) in Korean, in a difference from many other languages, the object relative clause is used frequently with inanimate heads and inanimate NPs within RCs. To sum up, both syntactic and semantic information were found to be important factors in the frequency distribution of Korean relative clauses.
Key words: Korean relative clauses, Thematic role, the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy, Corpus linguistics, Frequency-based approach.