Coordination and Binary Branching
Adam Przepiórkowski
March 2024
 

In “Subordination and Binary Branching”, a recent (2023) Syntax paper, Ad Neeleman and colleagues propose a new analysis of subordination. The main aim of this remark is to refute that analysis, using data from the coordination of unlike categories and unlike grammatical functions. Additionally, building on Neeleman et al.'s observations about the arbitrarily n-ary – not just binary – nature of coordination, I sketch a more Minimalist approach to subordination and coordination that is devoid of the problems that Neeleman et al.'s analysis faces, but otherwise covers a similar range of data. On this approach, “subordination” is a synonym of “result of PairMerge” and “coordination” is a synonym of “result of SetMerge”, where SetMerge is understood as an operation creating an arbitrary set, as opposed to the usual more specialized Merge operation, which creates a binary set.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/007319
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: published in Syntax; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/synt.12285
keywords: subordination, coordination of unlike categories, heterofunctional coordination, set merge, pair merge, minimalism, polish, syntax
previous versions: v3 [March 2024]
v2 [May 2023]
v1 [May 2023]
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