Relative clause construction has been generally studied in terms of the syntactic structure, and only a few researches on the funciton of noun-modifying clauses have been made. This paper deals sith the usage of noun-modifying clauses in discourse. Otsuka (1997) classified the noun-modifying clauses into three types in terms of "given information" and "new information, " and showed that each type has its own function in discourse. In this paper, however, it is shown that " background" could be the basic function of noun-modifying clauses in discourse
