The attributive versus final distinction and the manifestation of “main clause phenomena” in Japanese and Korean noun modifying clause constructions

要旨

Abstract This paper compares Japanese and Korean noun-modifying clause constructions (NMCCs) in terms of the extent to which they accommodate ‘main clause phenomena’. Specifically, Japanese NMCCs allow for address-politeness suffixes to occur, and for quoted speech to be manifested with minimal linking devices. These main clause phenomena are disallowed within Korean NMCCs. We argue that the greater tolerance toward main clause phenomena in Japanese NMCCs than in Korean counterparts is crucially related to a prominent morpho-syntactic difference between the two languages, i.e. the virtual absence (Japanese) versus systematic presence (Korean) of the distinction between attributive and sentence-final forms. The attributive-final distinction in Japanese was obliterated around the sixteenth century.

主題