Societas Linguistica Europaea 44 th Annual Meeting Logroño, 11 September 2011 Suffixal clause-linking in Korean on the subordination-coordination continuum Gerd Jendraschek & Yong-Min Shin University of Regensburg & Gyeongsang National University 1. INTRODUCTION • One peculiarity of Korean syntax is the existence of a large set of verbal suffixes to link clauses. Ihm & Hong & Chang (2001: 236-316) list 96 of them! • They are also called ‘conjunctive endings’ (연결어미 연결어미 연결어미 연결어미 yeonkyeoleomi 1 in Ihm & Hong & Chang 2001: 236; 㩧속어미 㩧속어미 㩧속어미 㩧속어미 ceopsokeomi in Lee & Ramsey 2000: 186). • The corresponding verb forms will be called ‘converbs’ (cf. Tikkanen 2001: 1119). • The focus of this talk is on four very common and morphologically simple suffixes: -eo(seo), -ko, -ciman and -keona. • The question is how they behave with respect to the much discussed distinction between coordination and subordination; Cristofaro (2010: 687-688) contains a list of the most relevant references. • It is not possible within the scope of this talk to provide an overview of the different approaches, let alone a solution to the problem. • The objective is to show that a. within the same language, different clause linking suffixes have different general syntactic properties, which result from their semantic properties, and in some cases from pragmatic inferences; b. the same linker may behave differently in different contexts, and be interpreted differently by different speakers; c. clauses have subordinate or coordinate properties, but a universal dichotomy between subordinate and coordinate linkage is not applicable; d. instead subordination and coordination denote two partly overlapping stretches on a continuum of syntactic integration (Figure 1) 2 ; e. syntactic interlacing (of two clauses) is the grammaticalized reflection of cognitive interlacing (of two situations); cf. Lehmann (1988: 218). Figure 1. The continuum of syntactic integration 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 autonomous sentence juxtaposed clause adjoined clause adverbial clause complement clause desententialized dependent in main clause head of main clause <-------------------- SUBORDINATION----------> <----COORDINATION-----> <---------EMBEDDING-------------------------> no syntactic interclausal relation syntactic integration between clauses weak ------------------------------------------------ strong clause fusion 1 The transliteration of Korean consonants follows Yale Romanization, while that of vowels follows the Revised Romanization of Korean, thereby attempting to combine the advantages of both systems. In quoted examples, transliteration and glosses have been adapted. 2 Similar continua can be found in Lehmann (1988:189 and 200) and Payne (1997:307).