This thesis deals with three aspects of Korean syntax: discourse ellipsis, topic and relative constructions. The general approach adopted here is not "a formal-sentential" one, where sentences are studied as the maximal unit of linguistic analysis in isolation from the context, but is rather a "functional and discourse-oriented" one, in which discoursal as well as situational contexts, language use, and other pragmatic considerations are taken into account in linguistic analysis.;Chapter 2 proposes a new analysis. It presents a theoretical model that can account for the syntax and semantics of incomplete sentences involving discourse ellipses. This model is composed of two mechanisms: the "generation process" that identifies zero anaphora and reconstructs the syntactic structure underlying an incomplete sentence; and the "interpretation process" that determines the value of the anaphora. It is argued that interpretations cannot be done in purely linguistic terms and that various non-syntactic factors such as inference and pragmatic knowledge should be considered. Coordinate ellipsis and Gapping are discussed as well.;Chapter 3 is about the notion of "topic." It proproses that topic is a gradient notion along the dimension of "aboutness." After arguing that topic, as a semantico-grammatical category in Korean, is a constituent of underlying structure, we discuss various semantic, syntactic, and discourse factors involved in topic choice. The form-function relationship of the particles ka and nun are also discussed.;Under the assumption that a relative head is the topic of the underlying embedded sentence, Chapter 4 examines various types of relative clauses in terms of topic-comment articulation. A linguistic explanation based on topic-comment structure is proposed to account for the incomprehensibility of self-embedding. A hypothesis that relative constructions are a syntactically frozen version of text is presented. Finally, it is argued that particle deletion in topics and relative constructions should be explained by the "recoverability" condition.;Chapters 1 and 2 concern discourse ellipsis. Chapter 1 reviews two earlier approaches to discourse ellipsis: the "syntactic deletion" approach and the "direct interpretation" approach of Shopen (1972a). It is argued that neither of these analyses provides a plausible account of ellipsis phenomena.
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