A Comparative Study On Adjective Clauses Between English And Korean

The study of adjective clauses has long been one of major topics in Generative Grammar. Based on Chomsky's Universal Grammar and Kayne's Antisymmetry theory and by using general theory and the method of comparative linguistics, this thesis not only compared and analyzed the adjective clauses in English and Korean language, but also discussed similarities and differences of adjective clauses from the syntactic and semantic aspects in these two language.From the phrasal and sentential level, following points are discussed in this thesis: the characteristic of structural relationships between the head noun and its adjective clause; the semantic relationships between the head noun and its adjective clause; the structural and semantic relationship between the predicate in main clause and its small clause; the structural and semantic relationship between the subject in main clause and its small clause.This thesis is made up of five chapters.Chapter one is introduction. It mainly includes the aim, the present situation, the scope and methods of my research.Chapter two is a summary about the adjective clause in English and Korean, including its definition, criterion for classification and its structural features.Chapter three is about the research of the head noun and the adjective clauses in a phrasal level. First, by applying the method of raising analysis, the constraint relationships on raising the head noun in two languages are discovered. And then universal constraints are concluded: a noun in a simple sentence can be raised to be the head noun when it serves as a subject, or an adverbial in both active and passive sentences, and an object in active sentence; if the noun shows the human property, it then can not be raised. The difference is that agent in simple sentence can be raised in English, while not in Korean. By reconstructing the head noun, a corresponding relationship between the head noun and the noun in its small clause is analyzed from the semantic relationship, and then the semantic features of the head noun are discovered.Chapter four is about the research of adjective clauses in a sentential level. From the aspect of the syntactic and semantic relationships, we discovered the constraint relationships of the predicate between the main clause and its small clause, and the constraint relationships between the subject in the main clause and its small clause; then, we sum up their common rule and individual differences based on these relationships.Chapter five is conclusion of this thesis.