Abstract
Bruening and Al Khalaf (2020) deny the possibility of coordination of unlike categories. They use three mechanisms to reanalyze such coordination as involving same categories: conjunction reduction, super-categories, and empty heads. We show that their proposal leaves many cases of unlike category coordination unaccounted for, and we point out various methodological, technical, and empirical problems that it faces. We conclude that the so-called Law of the Coordination of Likes is a myth. Instead, all conjuncts must satisfy any external restrictions on the syntactic position they occupy. Such restrictions may be rigid, resulting in categorial sameness, but when they are underspecified or disjunctive, category “mismatches” may arise.
Highlights
The view that only the same grammatical categories may be conjoined (e.g., Chomsky1957: 36), elevated to the status of a universal law (Williams 1981: sec. 2), has been repeatedly questioned (e.g., Sag et al 1985, Bayer 1996)
A more frequent view – concisely expressed in the following quote from The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) – seems to be that any constituents may be coordinated, as long as each is licensed in the syntactic position occupied by the coordinate structure: (1) If in a given syntactic construction a constituent X can be replaced without change of function by a constituent Y, it can be replaced by a coordination of X and Y. (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 1323)1
Since B&K do not adduce any independent motivation for these SCs, we conclude that such SCs are a completely new mechanism, motivated solely by the use to which it is put in Bruening and Al Khalaf 2020 – to work around unlike category coordination
Summary
The view that only the same grammatical categories may be conjoined (e.g., Chomsky. 1957: 36), elevated to the status of a universal law (Williams 1981: sec. 2), has been repeatedly questioned (e.g., Sag et al 1985, Bayer 1996). A more frequent view – concisely expressed in the following quote from The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) – seems to be that any constituents may be coordinated, as long as each is licensed in the syntactic position occupied by the coordinate structure:. Any apparent “sameness” requirements result from the fact that each conjunct must satisfy the constraints imposed on the syntactic position occupied by the coordinate structure. These constraints may be rigid, resulting in the sameness of categories of all conjuncts. Such predicative or modifier constituents have complex categories consisting of an SC and the usual basic category (NP, AP, etc.), for example, Pred: NP or Pred: AP In such cases, the identity of the SCs is sufficient for coordination to be licensed. While we follow B&K in relying on data from English, similar arguments could be made on the basis of other languages.
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