Semantic scope ambiguity in gapping and non-constituent coordination: a generative analysis

Abstract

AbstractCoordination has been thought to be a reliable test of constituency; thus all the cases of apparent non-constituent coordination (noncanonical coordination) were assumed to be derived via reduction: movement or ellipsis. This view has been challenged by facts from the semantics of non-canonical coordination, particularly scope ambiguity in gapping and non-constituent coordination. I provide here an analysis that accounts for this type of ambiguity. I propose that the ambiguity that arises in non-canonical coordination is structural; that is, the cases of coordination are derived from two sources (a vP source and a CP source), where each source is derived via AT B movement or ellipsis. I spell out an analysis in terms of left-to-right syntax, in which copying of displaced elements is allowed to be minimal under some circumstances, which facilitates the wide scope reading of scope-taking elements in non-canonical coordination. The analysis confirms the assumptions about constituency and structure in phrase structure grammars, such as Generative Grammar, by providing a purely syntactic analysis of the scopal peculiarities of non-canonical coordination. This result has implications on how syntactic chunks are produced and processed in the human brain, which can in turn benefit fields, such as psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, or even computational linguistics.

Keywords

• Coordination
• ellipsis
• movement
• gapping
• non-constituent coordination
• left to right syntax