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Article published In:
Applying Embodied Cognition and Cognitive Linguistics to language teaching
Edited by Paolo Della Putta and Ferran Suñer
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 21:1] 2023
► pp. 140–177
Regular articles

The Factive, IHRC, and Cleft constructions in Korean

ORCID logo | University of Minnesota Duluth
| SOAS, University of London

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.

Keywords: Cleft construction, Cognitive Grammar (CG), Factive construction, Internally Headed Relative Clause (IHRC) construction, kes the schematic noun, Korean
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Factive construction
  • 3.The IHRC construction
    • 3.1Properties of the IHRC construction
    • 3.2Restrictions on predicate types
    • 3.3Pragmatic restrictions
    • 3.4Metonymic interpretations
    • 3.5The properties of kes in the IHRC construction
  • 4.The Cleft construction
    • 4.1On the Korean Copular construction
    • 4.2The property of kes in the Cleft construction
    • 4.3The inversion puzzle
  • 5.Basic CG notions
  • 6.Analysis
    • 6.1The Factive construction
    • 6.2The IHRC construction
    • 6.3The Cleft construction
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations used in the gloss are as follows
  • References
Published online: 30 January 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00130.par
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