In defense of an HPSG-based theory of non-constituent coordination: a reply to Kubota and Levine

Abstract

We show that Kubota and Levine’s (Linguist Philos 38:521–576, 2015) characterization of the HPSG-based theory of non-constituent coordination proposed in Yatabe (in: Flickinger, Kathol (eds) Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, CSLI, Stanford, pp 325–344, 2001) and later works is inaccurate, and that the theory in question does not require any ad hoc mechanisms to account for the long-known fact that right-node raising and left-node raising can affect semantic interpretation. In the course of demonstrating this, we fill in some details of this HPSG-based theory that were left unspecified in the previous literature, and we also present novel accounts of split-antecedent relative clauses and of respectively interpretation that are consistent with the theory. Furthermore, we argue that the phenomenon of summative agreement may provide a reason to prefer this theory over CG-based theories like Kubota and Levine’s.