Coordination of unlikes
Geoff Pullum's
recent
discussion of "grave and deteriorating" in the Iraq Study Group
report returns us to the topic of the coordination of unlikes, which I
last blogged about in
a
long posting about "failures of parallelism". Geoff argues
with some care that "grave" in this example is an adjective, while
"deteriorating" is a verb form; "grave and deteriorating" is therefore
a violation of the Category Likeness condition (requiring that
conjuncts be of like category) that many people assume rigidly governs
coordination. Things aren't as simple as we'd like them to be.
For a while now, I've been collecting examples of coordinations that
violate Category Likeness. Here's a sampling of types that you
can find in English.
I'll start with the ISG example:
(1) AdjP + Ving: The situation in Iraq is grave
and deteriorating.
Here the coordination is in the predicate complement of
BE;
it's a coordination of a predicate adjective and a progressive verb
form. Two famous examples from the syntax/semantics literature
similarly have coordination in a predicate complement of
BE:
(2) NP + Ving: The temperature is ninety
(degrees) and rising.
(3) NP + AdjP: He is a Republican and proud of it.
(Example (2), with a predicate NP conjoined with a progressive verb
form, became famous through the work of Barbara Partee, example (3),
with a predicate NP conjoined with a predicate AdjP, in the HPSG
literature.)
From (3), we might speculate that what allows coordination of unlikes
there is at least in part semantic: the NP and AdjP there both denote
properties that are predicated of the subject. Now in English,
PPs can also be used this way, and here's a coordination of predicate
AdjP and PP:
(4) AdjP + PP: ... her colleague Steven
Chillrud, who was both afraid of heights and on vacation ... (New Yorker Talk of the Town piece,
8/28/06, p. 22)
On the basis of (4), we can concoct PP versions of (1) and (2): first,
with the PP in place of the progressive:
(5) AdjP + PP: The situation in Iraq is
grave and in decline. [invented]
(6) NP + PP: The temperature is ninety (degrees) and on the rise.
[invented]
and then with the PP in place of the AdjP/NP:
(7) PP + Ving: The situation in Iraq is in
crisis and deteriorating. [invented]
(8) PP + Ving: The temperature
is at a record high and rising. [invented]
There's a lot more to be said about these predicate examples, but I'll
pass on to some of other types.
One fairly common type conjoins two different kinds of purpose
expressions: infinitival VPs and PPs with the preposition
for:
(9) VPinf + PP: These [recommendations]
include the proposals to enlist the help of Iraq's neighbors and for
bolder peacemaking in Palestine. (leader in the Economist, 12/9/06, p. 11)
(10) PP + VPinf: ... fighting for prisoners' rights and to change the
system. (Mary Ambrose, announcing her "Your Call" radio program on
KALW, 6/7/06)
(11) PP + VPinf: Her only visits to the hospital had been for a variety
of broken bones and to deliver her two children. ("Diagnosis" column in
NYT Magazine, 4/25/05, p. 36)
An
earlier
posting on astounding ccordinations had an example of this type:
(12) PP + VPinf: ... designed for
closeness, comfort, and to clean itself automatically (Remington shaver
commercial, heard 21/21/04)
A related type conjoins an infinitival VP of purpose with an adverbial
subordinate clause of purpose:
(13) VPinf + so-Clause: The railroad magnate and
future founder of Stanford University expanded it [the Leland Stanford
Mansion in Sacramento] to 19,000 square feet to accommodate his growing
family and so he could use the mansion for receptions and other
official duties. (AP story printed in the Palo Alto Daily News, 7/4/05, p. 6)
Other sorts of adverbials of unlike category can be conjoined: an
adverbial subordinate clause of reason (with
because) plus a participial
absolute expressing reason:
(14) because-Clause
+ AbsoluteClause: Because I had to stay overnight and this being New
England, the only place to stay was a bed-and-breakfast. (Sarah Vowell,
Assassination Vacation, p. 1)
or a temporal PP with a temporal participial adjunct:
(15) PP + VPing: After a tender love affair
with the wife of an innkeeper, and having renamed himself for a short
while with the eccentric pseudonym of 'Lesbonico Pegasio', he [Lorenzo
Da Ponte] appears again in Vienna as 'poet' to the Burg theatre, and
the favourite of Emperor Joseph II. (John Mortimer, Where There's a Will, pp. 10-11)
A final type has two kinds of verb complements in coordination: a PP
(in both my recent examples, with the preposition
about) and a
that-clause:
(16) PP + that-Clause: Writing in Annals of
Internal Medicine, the researchers reported that doctors often did not
know about the results or even that a test had been ordered ... (NYT Science Times, 7/19/05, p. D6)
(17) PP + that-Clause:
"Meantime," Carswell piped up, "I don't need to remind you about making
that apology, or that you're still on suspension?" (Ian Rankin, A Question of Blood, p. 303)
An
earlier
posting on astounding coordinations cited a similar example in
which the PP was
in:
(18) PP + that-Clause: Kirk Arnott, assistant
managing editor [of the Columbus Dispatch], is the language cop or
watchdog of the Dispatch. He believes in informal and
conversational language, and that his paper should be as conversational
as possible, to be accessible and clear to readers. (MacNeil &
Cran, Do You Speak American?,
p. 61)
There are four large groupings in this inventory: the predicate
examples, the purpose complement examples, various coordinations of
adverbials, and verb complements. Overall, what we should
conclude from these cases is that similarity in function and meaning
can at least sometimes trump differences in syntactic category.
But, yes, there are a lot of details to work out.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at December 11, 2006 01:51 PM