Semantic scope ambiguity in gapping and non-constituent coordination: a generative analysis

Semantic scope ambiguity in gapping and non-constituent coordination: a generative analysis

Blog Article

Coordination has been thought to be a reliable test of constituency; thus all the Graters cases of apparent non-constituent coordination (noncanonical coordination) were assumed to be derived via reduction: movement or ellipsis.This view has been challenged by facts from the semantics of non-canonical coordination, particularly scope ambiguity in gapping and non-constituent coordination.I provide here an analysis that accounts for this type of ambiguity.I propose that the ambiguity that arises in non-canonical coordination is structural; that is, the cases of coordination are derived from two sources (a vP source and a CP source), where each source is derived via AT B movement or ellipsis.I spell out an analysis in terms of left-to-right syntax, in which copying of displaced elements is allowed to be minimal under some circumstances, which facilitates the wide scope reading of scope-taking elements in non-canonical coordination.

The analysis confirms the assumptions about constituency and structure in phrase structure grammars, such as Generative Grammar, by providing a purely syntactic analysis of the scopal peculiarities of non-canonical coordination.This result has implications on how syntactic chunks are produced and processed in the human brain, which can in turn benefit CHO-LES-TERIN fields, such as psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, or even computational linguistics.