FUNCTIONAL PROJECTIONS OF PREDICATES: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM COORDINATE STRUCTURE PROCESSING

. This paper reports the results of six experiments involving an online selfpaced reading task that examine the processing of coordinate small clause predicate phrases versus coordinated argument NPs. The results have particular significance for the analysis of small clause complement has an Agr projection associated with it. An adequate explanation of the processing of small claue coordination is shown to motivate a new parsing principle, Coordination Feature-matching, which accounts for the longer reading times observed for the coordination of predicates in small clause complements.