Abstract 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 Rizzi 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. In Liliane Haegeman (ed.), Elements of grammar , 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers).
Duk‐Ho An (Tue,) studied this question.