Abstract

This article seeks to critically assess the current body of research on Korean Multiple Nominative Constructions (MNCs), with a particular focus on studies grounded in cognitive-functional theories. The majority of research on Korean MNCs has been conducted within the formal-generative framework, which has led to significant advancements in our understanding. However, they suffer from the failure to recognize the context dependency of judgments of well-formedness regarding MNCs. Failure to pay due attention to contextual factors has led to misleading generalizations, with deleterious consequences for theoretical proposals built upon them. The critical survey of functionally oriented research on MNCs reveals complementary insights that can lead to a deeper understanding and informed analyses of MNCs. In particular, we focus on the illusive interpretive factors that constrain the outer nominal (or Major Subject) and the inner clause (or Sentential Predicate) in MNCs, arguing that MNCs can occur in a variety of discourse contexts, which implies that the reduction of MNCs to topic-comment structures is misguided. MNCs are structures that have subject-predicate partitions at more than one level where typical subject properties are distributed between the outer and inner subjects, as argued by earlier researchers. The illusive property of ‘relevance’ that Sentential Predicates must satisfy in a well-formed MNC is shown to be intricately tied to the interpretation given to the Major Subject.