The Syntax Of Coordination

Coordination is a syntactic construction which occurs in most languages. In the past, it has been a fruitful area of research, but also a controversial one. Arguments from coordination have been used in support of transformations, and against phrase-structure rules, but also in support of phrase-structure rules and against transformations. This

Addresses the syntactic issues raised by coordinate pairings, with particularly emphasis on their properties in English and Chinese.

Coordination in syntax is an important part of the analysis of sentence structure. Niina Ning Zhang addresses the issues raised by coordinate pairings and the implications of these structures, looking in particular at examples within English and Chinese. The volume covers the major questions regarding coordinates in syntax, providing a fresh perspective to arguments raised within previous literature. She explains how such coordinate complexes are structured, how some coordinators can be combined in parts of speech, the fixed nature of some of these pairings and what changes exist between the coordinate and non-coordinate constructions. The theories raised are backed up by a rich variety of examples as well as providing a cross-linguistic perspective, contextualising these ideas within current syntactic research.

The three volumes of Language typology and syntactic description offer a unique survey of syntactic and morphological structure in the languages of the world. Topics covered include parts of speech; passives; complementation; relative clauses; adverbial clauses; inflectional morphology; tense; aspect and mood; and deixis. The major ways these notions are realized u=in the languages of the world are explored, and the contributors provide brief sketches of relevant aspects of representative languages. Each volume is written in an accessible style with new concepts explained and exemplified as they are introduced. Although each volume can be read independently, together they provide a major work of reference that will serve as a manual for field workers and anyone interested in cross-linguistic generalizations.

This survey explores interactions between syntax and discourse, through a case study of patterns of extraction from coordinate structures. The theoretical breadth of the volume makes it the most complete account of extraction from coordinate structures to date: at first glance, it appears to be a syntactic matter, but the survey raises theoretical and empirical questions not just for syntax, but also across semantics, pragmatics, and discourse structure. Rather than promoting a single analysis, Daniel Altshuler and Robert Truswell outline reasonable hypotheses that allow theoretical conclusions to be deducted from empirical facts. The theoretical conclusions show that coordinate structures have the potential to discriminate between current syntactic theories, and to inform work on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. In many cases, however, the necessary empirical work has not yet been carried out, and too much of the literature revolves around the same handful of primarily English examples. The volume offers a starting point for further research on extraction from coordinate structures, particularly in understudied languages, and provides a guide to how to tease out the theoretical implications of empirical findings.

This book proposes a radical revision in the definition of phrase markers, the fundamental object in the generative theory of syntax. Phrase markers have traditionally been defined in such a way that each node in the phrase marker must satisfy a relation of either dominance or precedence with every other node. Grant Goodall argues convincingly that the dominance and precedence requirement should be dropped. The argument is lucidly articulated and is supported by a comprehensive description and analysis of of coordination in English and of causative and restructuring constructions in the Romance languages. Parallel Structures in Syntax is a significant and thoughtful contribution to syntactic theory, and arguably provides the simplest and most elegant account available of many of the complex phenomena observed in coordination, causatives, and restructuring. It will interest not only theoretical linguists, but also computational linguists and cognitive scientists.

Verbal Pseudo-Coordination (as in English ‘go and get’) has been described for a number of individual languages, but this is the first edited volume to emphasize this topic from a comparative perspective, and in connection to Multiple Agreement Constructions more generally. The chapters include detailed analyses of Romance, Germanic, Slavic and other languages. These contributions show important cross-linguistic similarities in these constructions, as well as their diversity, providing insights into areas such as the morphology-syntax and syntax-semantics interfaces, dialectal variation and language contact. This volume establishes Pseudo-Coordination as a descriptively important and theoretically challenging cross-linguistic phenomenon among Multiple Agreement Constructions and will be of interest to specialists in individual languages as well as typologists and theoreticians, serving as a foundation to promote continued research.

The papers collected in this volume (including a comprehensive introduction) investigate semantic and discourse-related aspects of subordination and coordination, in particular the relationship between subordination/coordination at the sentence level and subordination/coordination – or hierarchical/non-hierarchical organization – at the discourse level. The contributions in part I are concerned with central theoretical questions; part II consists of corpus-based cross-linguistic studies of clause combining and discourse structure, involving at least two of the languages English, German, Dutch, French and Norwegian; part III contains papers addressing specific – predominantly semantic – topics relating to German, English or French; and the papers in part IV approach the topic of subordination, coordination and rhetorical relations from a diachronic (Old Indic and Early Germanic) perspective. The book aims to contribute to a better understanding of information packaging on the sentence and text level related, within a particular language as well as cross-linguistically.