Selectional Violations in Coordination (A Response to Patejuk and Przepiórkowski 2023)

Abstract

Bruening and Al Khalaf (2020) show that selectional violations in coordination are extremely limited (there are exactly two) and exactly match those that are permitted in ellipsis and displacement. Patejuk and Przepiórkowski (2023) criticize Bruening and Al Khalaf’s article on numerous fronts. They do successfully show that conjuncts do not need to match in syntactic category, but their dismissal of the selectional violation data does not succeed. I present additional data, including the results of three large-scale acceptability surveys, that show that the two violations of selectional restrictions are real and are fully general. The two patterns that need an analysis are coordinations of NP&CP appearing where CPs are banned, and Adv&AP appearing in prenominal position where adverbs are banned. I propose a variation on Bruening and Al Khalaf’s analysis that accounts for all of the facts and meets Patejuk and Przepiórkowski’s objections.