Disjunction under single referent: voiding the ban on clitic coordination
Irene Amato, Adrian Stegovec
January 2025 

The inability of clitic pronouns to be coordinated is often taken to be one of their defining properties (Kayne 1975; Cardinaletti and Starke 1994; i.a.). This is observed with both conjunction and disjunction, and regardless of clitic host and placement requirements. Based on new data from Italian and Slovenian, we show that the ban on coordination of clitic pronouns is not absolute. Namely, the ban is lifted when the following three conditions are met: (i) the coordination is a disjunction, (ii) the clitic pronouns share a referent, and (iii) some φ-features on the clitic pronouns have contrasting values. We argue that the ban on coordination of clitic pronouns and its exceptions are tied to the different internal structure of clitic and strong pronouns and how it interacts with the interpretation of conjunction vs. disjunction in relation to the creation of plural discourse referents from coordinated pronouns.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008644 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	submitted
keywords:	pronoun typology, clitic pronouns, coordination, conjunction, disjunction, reference, focus, semantics, morphology, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [December 2024]
Downloaded:	448 times

 

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