Category Mismatches in Coordination Vindicated
Agnieszka Patejuk, Adam Przepiórkowski
April 2023 

In a recent paper, Bruening and Al Khalaf (2020) deny the possibility of coordination of unlike categories. In order to reanalyse category mismatches in coordination as involving the same categories, they use three mechanisms: conjunction reduction, supercategories, and empty heads. We show that their attempt still leaves many different cases of such coordination unaccounted for. In the discussion of their analysis, we also point out a number of methodological, technical, and empirical problems, which we consider to be fatal for their proposal. We conclude that the Law of the Coordination of Likes, as it is sometimes called, is a myth. Coordination does not impose any such constraint; rather, all conjuncts must satisfy any external restrictions on the syntactic position they occupy. In some cases such restrictions are rigid, resulting in categorial sameness; in other cases they are underspecified or disjunctive, resulting in category "mismatches".

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005912 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Linguistic Inquiry 54(2), pages 326–349
keywords:	coordination, unlike categories, conjunction reduction, empty heads, supercategories, unlikes, syntax
previous versions:	v4 [February 2022] v3 [July 2021] v2 [June 2021] v1 [April 2021]
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