Relative Clause in Linguistic Contrast

Abstract

The following article focusses on relative clauses and their linguistic realizations in German and Korean (as well as Japanese and Chinese in a brief survey). A differentiation is made between restricting and non -restricting relative clauses and their respective semantic and pragmatic functions. On the basis of w-words the realization of relative clauses is described. In this context different realizations in standard and dialect varieties can be detected. The particular features of Korean and Japanese relative clauses derive from the status of these languages as agglutinating languages following the right-hand head rule. Particularities of the relative sentence structure in Chinese are illustrated on the basis of the specific topic-rhema-progression.