Syntax calls the shots

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter surveys syntactic analyses of extraction from coordinate structures. We begin by outlining some desiderata for a syntactic account, and outline the challenge posed by the poor fit between the Coordinate Structure Constraint and other syntactic constraints on movement enumerated in recent work in the Chomskyan tradition. We distinguish three approaches to this challenge: some analyses (for example, those developed in Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar or Combinatory Categorial Grammar) reject central assumptions of Chomskyan locality theory; others (so-called ‘multiplanar’ analyses) derive the Coordinate Structure Constraint within the broad outline of Chomskyan locality theory by proposing a novel syntax of coordination which cannot be reduced to context-free phrase structure; and a final group of analyses (such as that of Munn 1993) reject the CSC as a syntactic constraint. The first two types of analyses are liable to undergenerate because they rule out asymmetric extraction patterns of the sort described in Chapter 3, while the final type of analysis is liable to overgenerate unless supplemented with nonsyntactic constraints of the sort to be discussed in Chapters 5 and 6.