CASE ASSIGNMENT AND THE ORDERING OF CONSTITUENTS IN COORDINATE CONSTRUCTIONS

HIS PAPER DEALS WITH THE FOLLOWING two phenomena found in coordinate constructions in English. First, ordinary rules of case assignment seem to be suspended when noun phrases (NP's) occur in coordinate structures. In particular, objective case pronouns never appear as the subject of a tensed clause unless they appear in a coordinate construction. For example, even in nonstandard dialects of English, we hear Me and him got fired but never *Me got fired or *Him got fired. Second, pronouns in coordinate structures are limited in terms of the order in which they can occur. For example, we hear He and I got fired but never *I and he got fired. In the following discussion, we argue that the suspension of case assignment rules in coordinate constructions is essentially STRUCTURAL in nature and that the ordering of pronouns in coordinate constructions is essentially PRAGMATIC in nature. More specifically, we argue that the suspension of case assignment follows quite naturally from Chomsky's (1981) theories of GOVERNMENT and BARRIERS.' According to these theories, the dominating NP in a coordinate structure serves as a barrier to government (and hence to case assignment) for each individual NP in the coordinate construction. In our pragmatic account of ordering, we argue that the linear order of NP's in coordinate constructions follows from Kuno's (1987) concept of EMPATHY: the degree of the speaker's identification with the referents of the NP's in a sentence. In particular, we propose that ordering is sensitive to the relative empathy value assigned to each NP in a coordinate structure.