Comitative coordination: A case study in group formation

This paper argues that in Russian a (singular) NP can combine with a comitative PP to form a complex plural NP, and that this NP denotes a group in the sense of Landman (1989). A single-headed GPSG analysis of the construction is proposed and argued for, and the implications of the analysis for number agreement are discussed. The semantic properties of the construction (and its counterpart in Polish) are subsequently detailed and are compared with those of ‘ordinary’ NP coordination; the preliminary conclusion is that the construction differs both in denotation and in conventional meaning from NP coordination.

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