This book takes Korean as a basis to provide a detailed universal Determiner Phrase (DP) structure. Adnominal adjectival expressions are apparently optional noun dependents but their syntax and semantics have been shown to provide an important window on the internal structure of DP. By carefully examining data from Korean, an understudied language, as well as from other unrelated languages, the book provides a broad perspective on the phenomenon of noun modification and its cross-linguistic variations. Furthermore, it offers not only a thorough syntactic analysis but also a formal semantic analysis of noun modifiers that extends beyond a single language. This book will be of great interest to researchers interested in theoretical syntax, its interfaces with semantics, pragmatics, linguistic typology, and language variation.

The overarching goal of this study is to investigate how syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors interact to produce what is called the Internally Headed Relative Clause construction in Korean and Japanese. This study shows that the constructions interpretation is determined by both grammatical factors and pragmatic factors. In addition, two sources of the semantic variability of the construction are isolated. The analysis advanced here establishes important connections between the semantics of a definite description and event structure, thereby solving the particularly challenging formal-linking problem, one that afflicts the previous E-type pronoun analyses. It also provides a constrained but flexible interpretive mechanism for the construction, eliminating the need for many of the extra-grammatical constraints that characterize existing treatments.