Coordination and the Syntax – Discourse Interface

This survey explores interactions between syntax and discourse, through a case study of patterns of extraction from coordinate structures. The theoretical breadth of the volume makes it the most complete account of extraction from coordinate structures to date: at first glance, it appears to be a syntactic matter, but the survey raises theoretical and empirical questions not just for syntax, but also across semantics, pragmatics, and discourse structure. Rather than promoting a single analysis, Daniel Altshuler and Robert Truswell outline reasonable hypotheses that allow theoretical conclusions to be deducted from empirical facts. The theoretical conclusions show that coordinate structures have the potential to discriminate between current syntactic theories, and to inform work on the interfaces between syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. In many cases, however, the necessary empirical work has not yet been carried out, and too much of the literature revolves around the same handful of primarily English examples. The volume offers a starting point for further research on extraction from coordinate structures, particularly in understudied languages, and provides a guide to how to tease out the theoretical implications of empirical findings.

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

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)