Speaker: Adam Przepiorkowski (University of Warsaw, Polish Academy of Sciences, MIT)
Title: Towards a Minimalist Theory of Coordination
Time: Thursday, September 12th, 12:30pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: To say that linguists do not agree on the syntactic structure of coordination is to say very little. Are phrases such as Lisa and Bart endocentric or exocentric? If they are endocentric, are they headed by one of the conjuncts (e.g., Lisa), or by the conjunction (e.g., and)? If they are headed by the conjunction (Conj), is their category ConjP? Or is it perhaps the case that the conjunction takes over some of the features of agrees with one of the conjuncts, so that Lisa and Bart is effectively an NP rather than a ConjP? Each of these options is implemented in a number of linguistic analyses.
Existing accounts often ignore or try to explain away coordination of unlikes: unlike categories (e.g., Bart is a rascal and proud of it), unlike cases (in languages such as Polish), and unlike grammatical functions (e.g., What and when to eat to stay healthy?). In this talk, I’ll argue that direct coordination of unlikes is real and that it provides arguments for the essentially exocentric nature of coordination. I’ll also recall arguments for the flat structure of n-ary coordinations, such as Lisa, Bart, and Maggie. Taken together, these aspects of coordination provide evidence for the existence of a general not just binary SetMerge operation in language. I’ll offer some initial thoughts on the nature of this operation, to be more fully developed during my stay at MIT in the coming months.