Coordination and Binary Branching
Adam Przepiórkowski
May 2023 

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.

[There are only very minor differences between the current version and v1: some typos were corrected, typesetting slightly improved, a few keywords added.]

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007319 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	accepted to Syntax
keywords:	subordination, coordination of unlike categories, heterofunctional coordination, set merge, pair merge, minimalism, polish, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [May 2023]
Downloaded:	197 times

 

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