Event Structure and Internally-headed Relative Clauses: a View from Korean and Japanese

The overarching goal of this study is to investigatehow syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factorsinteract to produce what is called the InternallyHeaded Relative Clause construction in Korean andJapanese. This study shows that the construction'sinterpretation is determined by both grammaticalfactors and pragmatic factors. In addition, twosources of the semantic variability of theconstruction are isolated. The analysis advanced hereestablishes important connections between thesemantics of a definite description and eventstructure, thereby solving the particularlychallenging formal-linking problem, one that afflictsthe previous E-type pronoun analyses. It alsoprovides a constrained but flexible interpretivemechanism for the construction, eliminating the needfor many of the extra-grammatical constraints thatcharacterize existing treatments.