Talk by Jong-Bok Kim on English free relative clauses

Title: Standard and Transparent Free Relative Clauses in English: A Construction Grammar Perspective

About the speaker: Jong-Bok Kim (Kyung Hee University, Seoul) is an Honorable Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Kyung Hee University in South Korea. His research areas include discourse analysis, syntactic structures in English and Korean, and construction-based approaches to language.

Abstract

English free relative clauses (e.g., These nations must pay [what they owe]) exhibit a mix of clausal and nominal properties: their internal syntax is clausal, while their external syntax is nominal. This duality raises complexities that challenge derivational and surface-oriented approaches alike. The talk first documents these mixed properties in detail and then develops a construction-based analysis that accounts for them while avoiding the pitfalls of previous accounts. The analysis is then extended to transparent free relatives (e.g., This corruption is [what they call systematic]), whose intriguing form-function mismatches follow from the same constructional mechanisms.