Relative Clause Constructions with Possessive Specifier Gaps : A Constraint-based Approach

This paper is concerned with a particular kind of Korean relative clause constructions that contain possessive specifier gaps, as opposed to complement or adjunct gaps. Those relative clauses have been known to violate Ross's Complex NP Constraint, and various attempts have been made to account for the apparent island violations. This paper argues that those relative clauses have possessive specifier gaps in the main relative clause, rather than in the embedded relative clause, and so there are no island violations involved in such relative clauses. It is argued that the island violations in question can be viewed as violations of selection restrictions of very general kind holding between nouns and their specifers. It is not necessary to impose any special constraints to account for the apparent violations observed in the particular kind of relative clauses discussed in this paper.