On coordination and how it does not involve selectional violations

Agnieszka Patejuk, Adam Przepiórkowski

Keywords: unlike category coordination, selectional restrictions, subcategorization

TL;DR: Unlike category coordination does not allow for violations of selectional restrictions.

Abstract: Examples such as “You can depend on my assistant and that he will be on time.” have long been assumed to involve violations of selectional restrictions, as “depend on” combines with an NP (“You can depend on my assistant.” is fine), but not with a CP[that] (“You can depend on that he will be on time.” is not). On this basis, such constructions have been assumed to provide an argument for asymmetric theories of coordination, on which the category of the coordinate structure is the same as the category of the first conjunct. By contrast, we argue that, contrary to this received wisdom, such constructions do not involve selectional violations and we provide an LFG analysis on which P + CP[that] combinations are ungrammatical because of a quirk of English c-structure rules.

Email Sharing: We authorize the sharing of all author emails with Program Chairs.

Data Release: We authorize the release of our submission and author names to the public in the event of acceptance.

Submission Number: 15