Syntax and Prosody of Coordination

This thesis investigates the syntactic and prosodic properties of what I call correlative coordination; coordination where each junct (i.e., conjunct or disjunct) has an overt coordinator (e.g., either…or…). I argue that the coordinators are focus-sensitive operators, and each coordinator has two positions. Only the higher position is semantically interpreted, and the lower position is semantically vacuous. These findings dovetail with previous proposals in other empirical domains, suggesting that perhaps all focus-sensitive operators have two positions in a sentence, and are interpreted in the higher position (e.g., Lee 2004, Cable 2007, Hole 2015, 2017, Hirsch 2017, Quek & Hirsch 2017, and Bayer 2018). The results reported here also suggest that the coordinator, traditionally considered to be the head of coordination (e.g., or and but), may not be the actual head, but just the daughter of a junct. A covert abstract Junction head takes all the juncts as its sister, and projects to the coordinated phrase. This is identical to Al Khalaf’s (2005) analysis of coordination, but supported here by different types of evidence. At the same time, correlative coordination does not always look like it has the syntax that I argue for. When the coordinators seem to be higher than where I claim, I argue that ellipsis has occurred to obscure the actual size of coordination and the position of the coordinators. In my syntactic theory of coordination, ellipsis is a veil that obscures the underlying syntax of coordination. In the second part of this thesis, which studies the mapping from syntax and prosody, I put ellipsis in the spotlight, and ask if elided material is truly silent. In a prosodic experiment that studies ellipsis in coordination, I argue that elided material has prosodic representation, despite being silent. I confirm previous experimental results that there is a close correspondence between syntax and prosody in coordination. Because the syntactic structure of coordination is recursive, this means that the prosodic structure may also be recursive, and replicate the dominance relations in syntax. I further argue that there is a close syntax-prosody correspondence, even when the coordinated phrases contain elided material. This has implications for the prosodic representation of silent material. An important assumption in the literature on syntax-prosody mapping is that silent material (e.g., null heads and their projections, and perhaps traces, etc.) does not have prosodic representation (Nespor & Vogel 1986; Chen 1987; Truckenbrodt 1999; Elfner 2015). Viewing this assumption in light of my experimental results, it appears that there may be a dichotomy of silent material: while null heads and their projections do not have prosodic representation, elided material does. Assuming a derivational account of the syntax-prosody mapping, a possible interpretation of these results is that prosodic structure is created at a point when material to be elided is not yet deleted, leaving effects of deleted material in prosody. But at this same moment of creation of prosodic structure, vocabulary insertion has already occurred, so that the syntax-prosody mapping can ignore phonologically null elements. Because ellipsis has prosodic effects, we may be able to detect elided structure not just based on syntactic-semantic evidence, but also based on prosodic evidence. I demonstrate this with another prosodic experiment that argues for the presence of ellipsis in correlative coordination based on subtle phonetic effects in prosodic boundaries. In doing so, I follow the tradition of drawing evidence for syntactic claims from prosody (e.g., Bresnan 1971 and Clemens & Coon 2018).

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Wu, Danfeng

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Flemming, Edward
• Fox, Danny
• Pesetsky, David

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/147367

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/147367