Tense Markers and -ko Constructions in Korean

There have been heated debates on whether tense markers in Korean are inflectional affixes or syntactic words. One of the strongest pieces of evidence for the latter position comes from tense-related phenomena in -ko constructions. These constructions are usually assumed to consist of two coordinate clauses. In this paper, we will see that the tense phenomena can be accounted for naturally by correctly identifying the non-past tense marker and by seriously taking consideration of the fact that -ko is ambiguous between a coordinate marker and a subordinate marker. It will be shown that the tense marker in the second conjunct does not have any effect on the first conjunct when -ko functions as a coordinate marker, which will render the position very weak that tense markers are syntactic words.