Syntax of Natural and Accidental Coordination: Evidence from Agreement

Adjective agreement with coordinated nouns in Finnish presents a puzzling pattern: in some cases, a plural adjective is required with coordinated singular nouns, while in other cases that seemto be syntactically identical, a plural adjective is disallowed. The key to this puzzle lies at the syntax-semantics interface: plural adjectives are required in cases of NATURAL COORDINATION, where a salient close relation holds between the conjuncts, but disallowed in cases of ACCIDENTAL COORDINATION. The semantic distinction between natural and accidental coordination has a syntactic reflex in Finnish, where only the features of the natural-coordination structure are compatible with the agreement requirements of plural adjectives. We show that the distinction between natural and accidental coordination is syntactically reflected not only in Finnish, but in other languages as well, including Tundra Nenets, Russian, and Kurdish.

[1]  S. Wechsler,et al.  A theory of agreement and its application to Serbo-Croatian , 2000 .

[2]  Greville G. Corbett,et al.  Hierarchies, Targets and Controllers: Agreement Patterns in Slavic , 1985 .

[3]  Caroline Heycock,et al.  Coordinated Bare Definites , 2003, Linguistic Inquiry.

[4]  Keith Allan,et al.  Hierarchies and the choice of left conjuncts (with particular attention to English) , 1987, Journal of Linguistics.

[5]  Bob Carpenter,et al.  The logic of typed feature structures , 1992 .

[6]  Yehuda N. Falk,et al.  Lexical-Functional Grammar: An Introduction to Parallel Constraint-Based Syntax , 2001 .

[7]  Mary Dalrymple,et al.  Determiner agreement and noun conjunction , 2004, Journal of Linguistics.

[8]  Stephen Wechsler,et al.  The many faces of agreement , 2003 .

[9]  Comrie Bernard.  Language Universals and Linguistic Typology , 1982 .

[10]  Martin Haspelmath,et al.  Coordinating constructions: an overview , 2004 .

[11]  J. Bresnan.  Lexical-Functional Syntax , 2000 .

[12]  Charles N. Li,et al.  Subject and topic , 1979 .

[13]  Tracy Holloway King,et al.  Nominals : inside and out , 2003 .

[14]  Irina Nikolaeva,et al.  A Grammar of Udihe , 2001 .

[15]  Bernard Comrie,et al.  When agreement gets trigger‐happy , 2003 .

[16]  Bernhard Wälchli,et al.  Co-compounds and natural coordination , 2005 .

[17]  Friederike Moltmann,et al.  Coordination and comparatives , 1992 .

[18]  Andreas Kathol,et al.  Studies in Contemporary Phrase Structure Grammar: Agreement and the syntax–morphology interface in HPSG , 2000 .

[19]  M. Minassian.  Grammaire d'arménien oriental , 1980 .

[20]  John D. Lynch,et al.  16. Coordination in Oceanic languages and Proto Oceanic , 2004 .

[21]  John T. Maxwell,et al.  Formal issues in lexical-functional grammar , 1998 .

[22]  Peter Peterson,et al.  Coordination: Consequences of a Lexical-Functional Account , 2004 .

[23]  Knud Lambrecht,et al.  Formulaicity, frame semantics, and pragmatics in German binomial expressions , 1984 .

[24]  Ivan A. Sag,et al.  Book Reviews: Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar and German in Head-driven Phrase-structure Grammar , 1996, CL.

[25]  Mary Dalrymple,et al.  Lexical Functional Grammar , 2001 .

[26]  John T. Maxwell III,et al.  Constituent Coordination in Lexical-Functional Grammar , 1988, COLING 1988.

[27]  LEON STASSEN,et al.  AND-languages and WITH-languages , 2000 .

[28]  R. Levy,et al.  The Chicken or the Egg? A Probabilistic Analysis of English Binomials , 2006, Language.

[29]  M. Dalrymple,et al.  Feature Indeterminacy and Feature Resolution. , 2000 .