| East Asian languages like Korean and Japanese are stocked with various types of clausal complex noun phrases. Among these phrase types, the gapless relative clause construction is exceptional in that there is no gap in the adnominal clause, unlike ordinary relative clause construction. The gapless relative clause construction is similar to noun complement clause construction syntactically because both constructions have no gap in the adnominal clause, but the gapless relative clause construction is different from the noun complement clause construction in the semantic and morphological respects.; Therefore, it is difficult to determine to which construction the gapless relative construction belongs. This dissertation claims that the gapless relative clause construction is a subtype of relative clause construction, not of noun complement, because it shares many properties with the ordinary/gappy relative clause construction except for the existence of a gap. The gapless relative clause construction also has a unique semantic property that a cause and effect relation holds between the adnominal clause and the head noun.; This dissertation also investigates various syntactic and semantic properties of other subtypes of clausal complex noun phrases. The relative clause construction has three subtypes: argument gap relative clause construction, adjunct gap relative clause construction and the gapless relative clause construction; the noun complement clause construction has two subtypes: free noun complement clause construction and bound noun complement clause construction. The bound noun complement clause construction, in turn, has its own subtypes: the so-called internally headed relative clause construction, perception verb construction, and ordinary bound noun complement clause constructions. In regard to bound noun complement clause constructions, the property of the generic bound noun kes is also discussed in detail. In this dissertation, the properties and interrelationships of all the subtypes of Korean clausal complex noun phrases are formally represented in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, utilizing its multiple inheritance hierarchy system and accompanying constraints. |
