Cho, Sookeun. 2016. A study on Korean internally-headed relative clauses through the analysis of corpus data from Korean speakers. Language Information. Volume 23. 77-94. The purpose of this study is to provide actual instances of Korean internally-headed relative clauses and to examine the characteristics of them. To achieve these goals, we analyzed the corpus data from Korean speakers consisting of 200 audio transcription files. The results of the analysis revealed that internally-headed relative clauses are actually used in Korean. The results of the analysis also revealed that only a subject and an object can be relativized in internally-headed relative clauses. In addition, The results showed that only a concrete noun can be allowed as head noun. The findings of the study suggest that there exist internally-headed relative clauses in Korean, but there are some syntactic and semantic-pragmatic restrictions on the use of them.
Key words: Relative clauses, Internally-headed relative clauses, Korean language development, Characteristics of internally-headed relative clauses, Existence of internally-headed relative clauses