Coordination and the Syntax – Discourse Interface

Abstract

Abstract The goal of this book is to explore interactions between syntactic structure and discourse structure, through a case study of patterns of extraction from coordinate structures. This is the most complete account of extraction from coordinate structures to date. This is a consequence of the theoretical breadth of the survey undertaken: extraction from coordinate structures is, at first blush, a syntactic matter, but the survey ranges far beyond syntax, and this breadth raises theoretical and empirical questions across syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse structure. A complete survey of extraction from coordinate structure must pay attention to all of these domains, and their interactions. Instead of aiming to promote a single analysis, this survey motivates reasonable hypotheses which allow one to reason deductively from empirical facts to theoretical conclusions. 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. However, in many cases, the necessary empirical work has not yet been done, and too much of the literature revolves around the same handful of examples, mainly in English. We hope that this book will inspire further work on extraction from coordinate structures, particularly in understudied languages, and provide a guide to how to tease out the theoretical implications of empirical findings.

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