The Effects of Thematic Role in Head Noun and Case Marking Information on Korean Relative Clause Re-parsing

Kwon, Youan; Kim, Youngjin; Nam, Kichun

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2003;8(1): 41-65.

Youan Kwon^` , Youngjin Kim^` , and Kichun Nam^`

권유안(Youan Kwon)| 김영진(Youngjin Kim)| 남기춘(Kichun Nam)

ABSTRACT

Head-final languages are different from head-initial languages in many respects. Korean is a head-final language. A number of sentence re-parsing models have been proposed for English, which is a head-initial language. The thematic roles of both head-nouns and case markers are characteristic of Korean sentences. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the thematic roles in Korean that affect the sentence re-parsing. Three experiments were carried out. The first off-line experiment was conducted in order to define the type of sentences that entail higher processing cost. It was found that the double displacement condition(D-D)brought about the highest degree of difficulty. In the second experiment, we manipulated the thematic roles of head-nouns in such a way that we could detect the different effects of the thematic roles on the re-parsing of head-nouns. The condition thus created was D-E, that is, the double displacements in the initial parsing with a single thematic role of “theme” in the head-nouns, which is contrasted with the D-D condition, which contains two thematic roles of “agent” and “theme” in the head-nouns. The result of the second experiment was that the reading time of the re-parsing region of the D-D condition was longer than that of the D-E condition. A third experiment was conducted to determine the effect of the topic marker “-nun,” which is used only in the matrix sentence in Korean, in reducing the cost of sentence re-parsing. It was found that the topic marker didn’t affect re-parsing; it affects only the initial parsing, which is in conflict with other studies advocating the role of the topic marker in sentence re-parsing in Korean. We could tentatively conclude that there seems to be interactions between lexical and syntactic modules.