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Metonymy in the Korean internally headed relative clause construction

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Published/Copyright: July 4, 2022
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 8 Issue 1

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the Korean internally headed relative clause (IHRC) construction from a Cognitive Grammar perspective. The primary issue concerning the Korean IHRC construction is the mismatch between the syntactic object and the semantic head. While the whole embedded clause headed by kes functions as a grammatical object, the semantic head may acquire the object status. I demonstrate that the mismatch is nothing but a metonymic process, just like the mismatch we observe in the loon in the water; even when only the loon’s feet are in the water, the expression is felicitously understood without identifying the particular portion of the loon under water. Just like the speaker accesses the loon’s feet through the loon, she accesses the semantic head through the reified embedded clause in the IHRC construction. I show that adopting this general human cognitive process helps us reach a broader generalization and sheds new light on hitherto neglected examples.

Keywords: active-zone/profile discrepancy; Cognitive Grammar; internally headed relative clauses; Korean; metonymy
Corresponding author: Chongwon Park, University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, MN, USA, E-mail:

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Received: 2020-12-03
Accepted: 2021-07-05
Published Online: 2022-07-04

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

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  2. Editorial
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https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2020-0134
Keywords for this article
active-zone/profile discrepancy; Cognitive Grammar; internally headed relative clauses; Korean; metonymy

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Editorial 2022
  4. Research Articles
  5. Perceptual similarity is not all: online perception of English coda stops by Korean listeners
  6. How Russian speakers express evolution in Pokémon names: an experimental study with nonce words
  7. Individual differences in simultaneous perceptual compensation for coarticulatory and lexical cues
  8. Phonetic change over the career: a case study
  9. Quantifying the importance of morphomic structure, semantic values, and frequency of use in Romance stem alternations
  10. The syntax of the diminutive morpheme -aaj in Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic
  11. Length, position, and functions of inter-clausal Chinese–English code-switching in a bilingual novel
  12. Discourse connectives and their arguments: an experiment on anaphoricity in German
  13. Modeling (im)precision in context
  14. The landscape of non-canonical ‘only’ in German
  15. Introducing Construction Semantics (CxS): a frame-semantic extension of Construction Grammar and constructicography
  16. Defining numeral classifiers and identifying classifier languages of the world
  17. A multivariate analysis of causative do and causative make in Middle English
  18. Unstressed versus stressed German additive auch – what determines a speaker’s choice?
  19. Metaphors are embodied otherwise they would not be metaphors
  20. A word-based account of comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda nouns in the Discriminative Lexicon
  21. Accounting for the relationship between lexical prevalence and acquisition with Bayesian networks and population dynamics
  22. L2 motivation and willingness to communicate: a moderated mediation model of psychological shyness
  23. Why are multiword units hard to acquire for late L2 learners? Insights from cognitive science on adult learning, processing, and retrieval
  24. Regularization in the face of variable input: Children’s acquisition of stem-final fricative plurals in American English
  25. The Manchester Voices Accent Van: taking sociolinguistic data collection on the road
  26. Interpreting the order of operations in a sociophonetic analysis
  27. Individual variation in performing reading-aloud speech among deaf speakers
  28. Generating hypotheses for alternations at low and intermediate levels of schematicity. The use of Memory-based Learning
  29. How can complex graphemes be identified in German?
  30. The Menzerath-Altmann law on the clause level in English texts
  31. A cognitive semantic analysis of ‘eat’ verb usages in Bangla
  32. Metonymy in the Korean internally headed relative clause construction
  33. Corpus linguistic and experimental studies on the meaning-preserving hypothesis in Indonesian voice alternations
  34. Monomodal and multimodal metaphors in editorial cartoons on the coronavirus by Jordanian cartoonists
  35. Corrigendum
  36. Corrigendum to: repetition in Mandarin-speaking children’s dialogs: its distribution and structural dimensions
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