The Factive, IHRC, and Cleft constructions in Korean

Abstract

This article aims to develop a Cognitive Grammar (CG) analysis of three grammatical constructions in Korean, all of which employ the bound noun kes. The data under examination includes the Factive, Internally Headed Relative Clause (IHRC), and Cleft constructions. We propose a uniform treatment of the three types of kes by arguing that it denotes a schematic noun that profiles a thing (noun) and has some role in the process of the adnominal clause. Different interpretations of these constructions arise due to different types of conceptualizations involved in each instance. In so doing, we point out that previous proposals that deal with kes are neither general enough to capture the commonalities observed in all three constructions nor can account for the new observations we present.