Deriving wide-scoping operators in an associative Lambek categorial grammar

Abstract

Previous analyses of sentences like Ward can't eat caviar and Sue get only beans regard them as coordinations of tenseless clauses. Siegel (1987) proposes a wrapping operation to insert the wide-scoping modal and negation into the first clause; others analyze such sentences as a kind of gapping. However, these sentences are part of a larger landscape of coordinations, where material such as question-marking, quantifiers, or another operator is syntactically part the first conjunct but scopes semantically over both. The conjuncts may be tensed clauses or VPs, making previous analyses inapplicable. Such coordinations are derivable in an associative Lambek categorial grammar.