Tenseless clausal coordination and the system of tense marking in Korean

Taking Chung’s (2001. The structure and tense interpretation of tenseless - ko coordination. Studies in Generative Grammar 11. 41–68, 2005. What does bare - ko coordination say about post-verbal morphology in Korean? Lingua 115. 549–568) discussion as a point of departure, I discuss the phenomenon of tenseless clausal coordination in Korean. I investigate the phenomenon from a broader perspective concerning the system of tense marking and temporal interpretation of the language. Showing that there are many environments where a null tense marker is used in Korean, I suggest that the null tense marker is the default realization of the tense head for both past and non-past tenses in the language. To capture the allomorphic alternation between overt and null tense markers, I propose two postsyntactic insertion rules for past and non-past tenses. Concerning how the tense head bears past or non-past specification in the first place, I adopt Stowell’s (1982. The tense of infinitives. Linguistic Inquiry 13. 561–570, 1996. The phrase structure of tense. In Johan Rooryck & Laurie Zaring (eds.), Phrase structure and the lexicon , 277–291. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2007. The syntactic expression of tense. Lingua 117. 437–463) analysis and reformulate it in terms of Agree relations involving the categories C, T, and Z and their tense features, the result of which feeds the aforementioned insertion rules. Based on this, I argue that tenseless clausal coordination involves a multiple feature-valuing configuration under TP-coordination. The current analysis not only explains tenseless clausal coordination in a way that is not construction-specific, but it also provides a novel account of the system of morphological tense marking in Korean. It is also suggested, albeit tentatively, that phases and spell-out domains may be relevant to determining how tense is morphologically marked. The current analysis is in line with the cartographic approach to clause structure – especially, that the traditional CP consists of a series of functional projections (Cinque 1999. Adverbs and functional heads . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Restructuring and functional heads: The cartography of syntactic structures , vol. 4. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Rizzi 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. In Liliane Haegeman (ed.), Elements of grammar , 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers).