Korean Kes-Relative Clauses as Stages

Korean Kes-Relative Clauses as Stages  Sang-Hee Park Department of English Language and Literature, Seoul National University, 599 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul 151-742, Korea sang8316@gmail.com Abstract. Recently, M.-J. Kim (2008) provided a reformulation of the Relevancy Condition on kes-relative clauses (kes-RCs) (Kim, Y.-B. 2002), the so-called internally headed relative clauses in Korean. In her analysis, the bipartite conditions of Kim (2002), one involving simultaneity between the main and the relative clause and the other involving a ‘resultant theme’, are collapsed into one involving a temporal overlap between the main and the relative clauses. In Kim (2008), the kes-RC is assumed to describe a temporary state which overlaps with the main event (i) if the relative clause contains an atelic predicate and the aspect is progressive, or (ii) if the relative clause contains a telic predicate and the aspect is perfect as well as progressive. This paper, however, claims that M.-J. Kim’s analysis still suffers from empirical problems, based on new type of examples; they show that (i) the relative clause can contain an atelic, perfect predicate if it is a stative type and (ii) the relative clause denote the volition or prediction of the speaker. The present paper proposes that kes-RCs denote a stage, which instantiates at the time of the main clause’s event. Keywords: internally-headed relative clauses (IHRC), stage, the Relevancy Condition, aspect, tense  I would like to deliver sincere gratitude to Prof. Ki-Sun Hong for insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Copyright 2010 by Sang-Hee Park 1 Introduction The kes-relative clause (kes-RCs), the so-called internally headed relative clause (IHRC), is identified by a relative clause and the morpheme kes, which is followed by a predicate that requires an entity argument. Typical examples of the kes-RC are shown in (1), where the relative clause appears within the bracket. (1) a. [cholaha-n senpi-ka kama-lul syewu-ko ccelccelmya-nun] kes-ul [poor gentleman-Nom a palanquin-Acc stop in a fluster-Imprf ] kes-Acc manna-ass-ta meet-Pst-Decl ‘A poor gentleman was in a fluster while holding on a palanquin and I met him.’ b. [chenge-lul passak mali-n] kes-ul tocangkwuk-uy comisengpun-ulo [herring-Acc completely dry-Prf-Rel] kes-Acc soup seasoning-Instr sse-ss-ta use-Pst-Decl ‘A/The herring had been completely dried, and I used it to give flavor to the soup.’ (Sejong Corpus) PACLIC 24 Proceedings 661 Kes-RCs have been claimed to be subject to the Relevancy Condition (Kuroda 1976 for Japanese, Y.-B. Kim 2002, M.-J. Kim 2008 for Korean). This paper examines two recent renditions of the Relevancy Condition in Y.-B. Kim (2002) and M.-J. Kim (2002) and shows that they still suffers from empirical problems. As it will be argued later, the varying degree of acceptability of kes-RCs with respect to the relative clause’s tense and aspect can be better explained under the notion of stages in the sense of Carlson (1997).1 2 2 The Relevancy Condition Compared to the externally headed relative clause (EHRC), IHRCs have been known to observe an additional interpretability condition, the Relevancy Condition. The following is a rendition of the Relevancy Condition for Korean kes-RCs, provided …

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