Coordination of Unlike Categories Creates Grammaticality Illusion

Nayoun Kim, Jiayi Lu*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Coordinate structures with mismatched DP and CP conjuncts can occupy the complement position of a preposition (e.g., “You can depend on my friend and that she will be on time.”). Such examples pose a challenge to previously proposed syntactic generalizations including the Law of Coordination of Likes, and the Wasow’s Generalization. Attempting to resolve this problem, recent proposals analyze such DP&CP coordinate structures as underlying DP&DP coordination structures, where the CP conjuncts are contained inside silent nominal shells. Under such proposals, the DP&CP coordination does not violate the Law of Coordination of Likes or the Wasow’s Generalization. In this study, we present psycholinguistic evidence against such analyses, and suggest an alternative analysis where the DP&CP coordination is indeed ungrammatical but appears acceptable due to a grammaticality illusion.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)52-61
Number of pages10
JournalKorean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
Volume24
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024
Externally publishedYes

Funding

Jiayi Lu (corresponding author) Stanford University [email protected] * Parts of this version were presented at the LSA 2023. We would like to thank Adam Przepiórkowski, Nick Huang, the audiences at the Stanford Syntax and Morphology Circle as well at the LSA 2023, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and feedback. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF- 2023S1A5A8079483).

Keywords

  • coordination
  • DP and CP coordination
  • experimental syntax
  • grammaticality illusion
  • syntactic category

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Education
  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language

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