Relative Clause Constructions with Possessive Specifier Gaps : A Constraint-based Approach

RELATIVE CLAUSE CONSTRUCTIONS WITH POSSESSIVE SPECIFIER GAPS: A CONSTRAINT-BASED APPROACH * Byung-Soo Park Department of English Kyung Hee University Seoul, Korea Email: byspark@nms.kyunghee.ac.kr ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with a particular kind of Korean relative clause constructions that contain possessive specifier gaps, as opposed to complement or adjunct gaps. Those relative clauses have been known to violate Ross's Complex NP Constraint, and various attempts have been made to account for the apparent island violations. This paper argues that those relative clauses have possessive specifier gaps in the main relative clause, rather than in the embedded relative clause, and so there are no island violations involved in such relative clauses. It is argued that the island violations in question can be viewed as violations of selection restrictions of very general kind holding between nouns and their specifers. It is not necessary to impose any special constraints to account for the apparent violations observed in the particular kind of relative clauses discussed in this paper. 1. INTRODUCTION In this paper, I discuss a class of relative clauses that are distinct from ordinary relative clauses (RCs) in that no complement or adjunct gaps occur in the relative clause. A typical example is a phrase like (1). (1) [nwun-i yeypp-un] ai eye-nom pretty-rel child 'child whose eyes are pretty' I will argue that the subject NP of the RC nwun 'eye' has a specifier gap inside it and the gap is coindexed with the head noun ai 'child'. Let me propose to call RCs like (1) possessive RC constructions, partly borrowing from the English possessive relative pronoun whose. Korean, Japanese and Chinese linguists have long been interested in such possessive RC constructions because they appear to violate Ross's Complex NP Constraint (CNPC) when the subject is modified with another relative clause, as shown in (2): (2) [fie, ip-un], os-i terewu-n], sinsa, wear-rel clothes-nom dirty-rel gentleman 'gentleman whose clothes that he wears are dirty' It has been claimed that the expression like (2) constitutes a CNPC violation because the subject of the embedded relative clause ip-un has been extracted to the head noun crossing two S boundaries, as indicated by the gap in the inner RC and the two occurrences of its index in (2). (Kuno (1976) and Yang (1986)) Recently, Na and Huck (1993) proposed essentially a semantic-pragmatic approach to possessive RCs, and their explanation is based on a certain pragmatic relation between a noun in the relative clause and its head noun, for example, os 'clothes' and sinsa 'gentleman' in (2), what they call a "thematic subordination" relation.' In the case of the two nouns 'clothes' and 'gentleman,' according to their This study is supported by Kyung Hee University Research Fund in the academic year 1998. Parts of this paper were presented at the Monthly Meeting of the Korean Society for Language and Information in September 1998, at the International -143- definition of thematic subordination, 'clothes' are subordinately related to the 'gentleman' in our real world because the former may be part of …

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