4. What does coordination look like in a head-final language?

Nayoung Kwon | University of California, San Diego

Maria Polinsky | University of California, San Diego

Theories of clause linking treat coordination and subordination as mutually exclusive. In this paper, we examine a case where the surface distinction between coordination and subordination is obscured. Concentrating on the-ko construction in Korean, we show that a clause chain can be structurally ambiguous – it can either have all the properties of a coordinate structure or all the properties of a subordinate structure. The choice between the two types is determined by the construal of the events in question as parallel (coordination) vs. causal/sequential (subordination). We present diagnostics for determining subordination vs. coordination and show a correlation between syntactic and semantic properties involved in such structures.

Keywords: causality, clause chain, clause linkage, coherence, Coordinate structure constraint (CSC), coordination, -ko construction, Korean, sequentiality, subordination

Published online: 15 May 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/celcr.11.06kwo

Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Kim, Soung-U

2019. The Morphosyntax of Jejuan –ko Clause Linkages . Lanaguage Research 55:2 ► pp. 315 ff.

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