Coordination in Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar

Abstract

We formulate explicit analyses of certain non-standard coordination examples discussed in Levine (2011) in a variant of categorial grammar called Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar (Kubota 2010; Kubota & Levine 2012; Kubota to appear). These examples are of theoretical importance since they pose significant challenges to the currently most explicit and most comprehensive analysis of coordination, formulated in a variant of HPSG called Linearization-based HPSG (Reape 1996; Kathol 1995) and advocated by various authors in the recent literature (Yatabe 2001; Crysmann 2003; Beavers & Sag 2004; Chaves 2007; Sag & Chaves 2008). This approach, which we call the Linearization-Based Ellipsis (LBE) approach to coordination, builds on the key idea that apparent non-standard coordination all reduce to constituent coordination under surface ellipsis. The seemingly heterogeneous set of data catalogued in Levine (2011), involving different types of non-standard coordination, uniformly point to an analysis in which the apparently incomplete constituents that are coordinated in the overt string are in fact complete (i.e. nonelliptical) constituents with full-fledged semantic interpretation, thus directly counterexemplifying the predictions of ellipsis-based approaches including the LBE variant. The sophisticated syntax-semantics interface of the framework we propose in this paper straightforwardly captures the interactions between such non-standard coordination and various scopal expressions, demonstrating the real empirical payoff of the direct coordination analysis of non-standard coordination (of the kind widely adopted in categorial grammar) that has not been fully recognized in the previous literature.