Earticle

The topic of selection of a grammatical subject in a correlative conjunction phrase has long failed to attract the attention of linguists due to some difficulties not only in figuring out the internal structure of NP’s conjoined by a correlative conjunction but also in its heavy dependency on the representational aspects each correlative conjunction demonstrates. In this paper, I have explored the seemingly complex patterns in the selection of a grammatical subject in a correlative conjunction phrase in the frame of the Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993, 2008). I show that, with the help of three newly developed constraints such as MinDist, Focus, and PARSE which are ranked relatively to each other, an optimal grammatical subject out of two NP candidates conjoined by a correlative conjunction can be correctly selectable.