Verbal Conjunctions in Korean, English and Japanese

This paper compares sequential and non-sequential verbal conjunctions in Korean, English, and Japanese by looking at how sequential verbal conjunction is treated in each language. It frist reviews verbal conjunctions in Korean, where sequential conjunction is treated as subordination and non-sequential conjunction is treated as coordination, and looks at verbal conjunctions in English and Japanese to see whether or not sequential conjunction in those languages is subordination. According to Oh (2010), sequential and non-sequential conjunctions in Korean behave quite differently with respect to the tense and negation in the final conjunct. Also, Cho (1995, 2005) and Kwon (2004) show that syntactic operations such as extraction and scrambling clearly distinguish sequential conjunction from non-sequential conjunction. The purpose of this paper is to see how sequential and non-sequential conjunctions are analyzed in English and Japanese and to compare those languages with Korean, especially focusing on whether or not sequential conjunctions in English and Japanese are treated as subordination. For this purpose, I first investigate how tense and negation, which provided crucial evidence for concluding that Korean sequential conjunction is subordination, is interpreted in sequential and non-sequential verbal conjunctions in English and Japanese. Also, I investigate the syntactic properties of sequential and non-sequential conjunctions with respect to syntactic operations such as extraction and scrambling in those languages. The results of the investigation show that in Japanese, which is considered typologically similar to Korean, the sequential conjunction is a case of subordination, while in English, which is considered typologically different from Korean, both sequential and non-sequential conjunctions are treated as coordination.