Past Event

Attachment ambiguity of relative clauses in Korean revisited

Dr. Soyoung Kang
(Carleton University)

The ambiguity of relative clause attachment in a sentence such as ‘Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony’ has been extensively investigated using various languages. The resolution of this type of attachment ambiguity has been shown to vary across different languages; languages like English have been shown to prefer the low-attachment (i.e., the actress was on the balcony) whereas languages like Spanish, Dutch and others show the high-attachment preference (the servant was on the balcony). Korean has been claimed as belonging to the language group of the high-attachment preference (Jun, 2003; Lee & Kweon, 2004), which is accounted for by several proposals such as Predicate Proximity (Gibson, Pearlmutter, Canseco-Gonzalez, & Hickok, 1996) or Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (Fodor, 1998). The current study casts doubt on the high-attachment preference in Korean and this tendency for the high attachment reported in previous studies is partly due to the referential property of nouns, especially the NP1 in the Korean sequence of RC NP1 NP2. To test this idea, an off-line questionnaire study was conducted with two variables; the first one was the semantic content of NP1 (common nouns vs. proper nouns) and the second one was the phonological length of the RC. Preliminary results show that there is an effect of the semantic content of NP1 on the attachment of the relative clause whereas the length of the relative clause has no effect, lending support for the idea that modifiability of NPs has an effect on the attachment of nominal modifiers (Thornton, MacDonald & Gil, 1999).

About the Speaker

Dr. Soyoung Kang holds a PhD from the Department of Linguistics at the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, where she specialized in psycholinguistics. Her dissertation, “Effects of prosody and context on the comprehension of syntactic ambiguity in English and Korean”, examined the role of prosodic structures and context in resolving syntactic ambiguity in English and Korean. Her current research interests also include syntactic ambiguity resolution by L2 speakers, acoustic cue weightings in English/Korean stop contrasts, and English stress perception by L2 speakers.