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This survey explores interactions between syntax and discourse, through a case study of patterns of extraction from coordinate structures. It offers a starting point for further research on extraction from coordinate structures and provides a guide to how to tease out the theoretical implications of empirical findings.
List of contents
- 1: Introduction
- 2: What is coordination?
- 3: Extraction from coordinate structures
- 4: Syntax calls the shots
- 5: Discourse calls the shots
- 6: Discourse structure
- 7: Conclusions
- Appendix: List of choice points
About the author
Daniel Altshuler is Associate Professor of Semantics at the University of Oxford. He specializes in formal semantics and pragmatics. The theme of his research is context dependence with the aim of better understanding how compositional semantics interacts with discourse structure and discourse coherence. He also has active interests in philosophy of language and philosophy of literature, including their intersections. He is the author of Events, States and Times (de Gruyter, 2016), co-author of A Course in Semantics (MIT Press, 2019), and editor of Linguistics meets Philosophy (CUP, 2022).
Robert Truswell is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh. He specializes in syntax and the syntax-semantics interface, and aims to simplify syntactic theory by developing nonsyntactic accounts of phenomena such as locality, scope, and binding, through developing theories of the division of labor between syntax and semantics, and theories of the effect of recurring patterns of grammatical change on synchronic grammatical typology. He is the author of the OUP monograph Events, Phrases, and Questions (2011), and editor or co-editor of three other OUP volumes: Syntax and its Limits (2013), Micro-change and Macro-change in Diachronic Syntax (2017), and The Oxford Handbook of Event Structure (2019; paperback 2021)
Summary
This survey explores interactions between syntax and discourse, through a case study of patterns of extraction from coordinate structures. It offers a starting point for further research on extraction from coordinate structures and provides a guide to how to tease out the theoretical implications of empirical findings.
Additional text
The volume aims to fruitfully reconcile two fundamentally different approaches to extraction from coordinate structures in the research literature, the 'syntax calls the shots' approach has attempted to 'reduce patterns of extraction from coordinate structures to principled statements about constraints on unbounded dependencies in syntax', whereas the 'discourse calls the shots' has relied on 'asyntactic statements about the interpretation of unbounded dependency constructions in specific discourse contexts'.
