A Dual Analysis of Verb-less Coordination in Korean

Abstract

This paper explores the nature of verb-less coordination (VLC) in Korean. Various proposals have been made to explain the peculiar properties of VLC: movement analysis, string deletion analysis, and multiple dominance analysis. We show that none of these analyses are fully satisfactory by observing apparent mismatches between elided parts in the first conjunct and the shared parts in the second conjuncts. We claim that ellipsis analysis is basically correct in capturing apparent mismatches which we coin as vehicle change effects. However, we further propose that some VLC constructions are instances of multiple fragments. Hence VLC in Korean exhibits the dual nature. We show that multiple fragments analysis of VLC is selectively available only with distributed reading of the shared verb, otherwise ellipsis analysis of it is forced by default.