Unbalanced case and the syntax of coordination
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v9i1.5677Keywords:
unbalanced case, genitive of quantification, mutual adjunction, concord, Bosnian/Croatian/SerbianAbstract
Coordinate structures seem to display a mix of both asymmetric and symmetric properties. As a result, individual theories of the syntax of coordination roughly divide into two classes: those that argue for an asymmetric syntax and those that adopt a symmetric syntax. This paper investigates an apparently asymmetric property of coordination, unbalanced case, where not all conjuncts in a coordinate structure realize the same case. I examine data from Bosnian/Croatian/ Serbian which provide evidence of a first-conjunct effect, where the acceptability of an example depends on the ability of the first conjunct to realize the case licensed on the coordinate structure. Despite this case asymmetry, I show that the data are compatible with theories that argue for symmetric syntax, which have gained traction in recent work. The proposed analysis relies on a theory of concord as realization and a postsyntactic condition on case adjacency.
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Copyright (c) 2024 Anna Grabovac
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.