The Coordinate Structure Constraint: not a constraint on movement
Dominique Sportiche
December 2025 

December 2024 version: minor correction and some new material on movement of a conjunct. The Coordinate Structure Constraint (CSC) is typically taken to be a constraint on movement prohibiting extraction of, or from, a single conjunct and is used as a move- ment diagnostic. This note first mostly merely recapitulates existing work, Ruys (1993), Fox (2000), Lin (2001), Lin (2002), Johnson (2009) on extraction from a conjunct, adding some con- trols, and a short discussion of movement of a conjunct. These works demonstrate that both A and A-bar overt or covert movement can systematically violate the CSC under the right conditions and suggest instead that that part of the CSC should be viewed as a constraint on interpretation. This allows movement to violate the CSC, as long as the output (at LF) is interpretively well formed. It next adds a short discussion of movement of a conjunct - reported to be allowed in some languages displaying a first conjunct/other conjuncts asymmetry - concluding that covert movement cannot violate that portion of the CSC either. It next briefly discusses some consequences regarding binding, control theory, clitic doubling and unification approaches.

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Reference:	lingbuzz/007934 (please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords:	syntax, semantics, constraints, movement, islands, island, coordinate structure constraint
previous versions:	v9 [December 2024] v8 [December 2024] v7 [December 2024] v6 [November 2024] v5 [April 2024] v4 [February 2024] v3 [March 2024] v2 [February 2024] v1 [February 2024]
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