Earticle

This paper presents a new account of the types of nominal coordination in Korean. My claim is that if Case inflections are marked in all the conjoined NPs, the conjoined structure is not an NP coordination but a clausal coordination. In other words, the string of the form ［NP-Case and NP-Case］ is not a constituent NP but a structure derived from a clausal coordination by the Conjunction Reduction, which deletes identical elements at the edge of the conjoined clauses (Chomsky 1957). In my analysis, Conjunction Reduction is subsumed under PF-deletion a la Chomsky (1995). My analysis theoretically supports the existence of the Conjunction Reduction in the theory of grammar. My analysis also implies that Case inflections must only be attached to the final conjunct in NP coordination. This analysis is strikingly parallel with the behavior of verbal inflections in VP coordination (Yoon 1994). From this parallelism, my analysis provides a unified account of phrase-structural properties of NP and VP coordination in Korean.