Przepiórkowski, Adam & Patejuk, Agnieszka: Coordinate structures without syntactic categories

Coordination of unlikes may target not only different grammatical categories (represented in c-structures) but also different values of morphosyntactic or lexical features (represented in f-structures). For example, BELIEVE may combine with a PP headed by in (but not, say, on) and a CP headed by that (but not, say, whether), and so it may occur with a coordination of PP[in] and CP[that], as in the attested "We all believe [in positive energy and that what you give comes back].” Previous analyses do not make it possible to state such selectional restrictions in a uniform way. We propose to move categorial information from c-structures to f-structures and to represent selectional restrictions only at the latter syntactic level. This move also solves the long-standing problem of the syntactic category of coordinations of unlikes: they have no syntactic category whatsoever – not ConjP, not that of the first conjunct, not a complex category. The publication associated with this presentation is: Adam Przepiórkowski and Agnieszka Patejuk, Coordinate structures without syntactic categories, in I Wayan Arka, Ash Asudeh, and Tracy Holloway King, editors, Modular Design of Grammar: Linguistics on the Edge, pages 205–220. Oxford University Press, 2021.

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April 25, 2022