Relevance of Grammar and Pragmatics to the Relevancy Condition

This article claims that what is referred to as the Relevancy Condition on Korean Internally Headed Relative Clauses (IHRC) (Kuroda 1976-77, Y.-B. Kim 2002) consists of both grammatical and pragmatic sub-conditions, which respectively make the embedded clause related to the embedding clause via a grammatical mediator and bear a circumstantial, a causal, or a concessive relation to it. I show, however, that while the grammatical condition has to be met by every IHRC, the pragmatic condition need not be, contra the prevailing assumption. Based on this observation, I classify IHRCs into two types: the entity-central type and the event-central type. In addition, I take up the fundamental question yet to be answered, namely why such a condition holds for the IHRC construction to begin with.