WH-구문에 관한 연구

Abstract

Uncountable sentences are used for communication in English. In English structure, certain rules and restrictions exist. One of the English constructions which play an important role in understanding such rules and restrictions is WH-constructions. The purpose of this thesis is to study on WH-constructions. That is, analyzing and making statements on WH-Questions, WH-Relatives, and WH-Clefts. First, I review general properties of WH-words and WH-phrases so that clear further chapters of the study. Second, I study on WH-Question. I explore the properties in the syntactic, morphological, semantic, and phonological aspects. In syntactic aspect, WH-Question is related to the sub-categorization and the gap argument. In the morphological aspect, it is related to the agreement argument and case marking argument. In semantic argument, it is connected with the interpretation of reflexive pronoun and the selection restriction. Also, in the phonological aspect, it is associated with the auxiliary contraction and wanna contraction. Third, I describe two kinds of WH-relatives, restrictive and non-restrictive. Relatives are regarded as the most prominent phenomena among those embedded structures which add precision to the meaning of the sentence. I explore differences between restrictive clauses and non-restrictive clauses in the morphological, semantic, and syntactic aspects. And I study WH-movements in WH-relatives. Also, I analyze their deep structures and examine transformation processes. Finally, I research WH-Cleft sentences, particularly, what-cleft phrase. English cleft constructions are the constructions that have structural and semantic properties in themselves. To begin with, I observe the general properties of English WH-Cleft construction. And, I study the differences between the two types of WH-Cleft, that is, specifications and predications in structural and pragmatic aspects. Among the structural properties, there are agreement effects, extraction restrictions, etc. Also, I describe the differences between two WH-Clefts through two pragmatic properties, information structure and exhaustivity. Through this study, I try to help understanding WH-constructions in general and suggesting an intense observation on the grammatical function and meaning in the language research. And to make this study further, various and new grammatical researches on this subject should be followed.