4. What does coordination look like in a head-final language?

Theories of clause linking treat coordination and subordination as mutually exclusive. In this paper, we examine a case where the surface distinction between coordination and subordination is obscured. Concentrating on the-ko construction in Korean, we show that a clause chain can be structurally ambiguous – it can either have all the properties of a coordinate structure or all the properties of a subordinate structure. The choice between the two types is determined by the construal of the events in question as parallel (coordination) vs. causal/sequential (subordination). We present diagnostics for determining subordination vs. coordination and show a correlation between syntactic and semantic properties involved in such structures.