Annotating Korean adnominal ending constructions in corpus data: Beyond relative-clause identification

Abstract

The Korean adnominal ending \texttt{ETM} occurs in diverse noun-modifying constructions, including relative-clause-like modifiers, adjectival and copular forms, bound-noun constructions, and lexicalized expressions. This paper argues that \texttt{ETM} is not a direct marker of relative-clause structure, but a morphological exponent shared by several adnominal constructions. We propose a corpus-based typology that distinguishes these constructions using predicate type, auxiliary structure, argument-structural compatibility, head-noun restriction, and lexicalized patterns. We operationalize the typology as a construction-sensitive annotation layer for the KLUE dependency treebank, implemented through an ordered rule-based procedure and evaluated by manual validation. Productive relative-clause-like uses account for 39.4\% of the analyzed instances; the remainder consists mainly of adjectival, copular, bound-nominal, modal, temporal, and collocational constructions. The findings show that Korean relative-clause-like modification cannot be identified from adnominal morphology alone.