Subordination and binary branching

Abstract

Syntactic representations are overwhelmingly asymmetric and binary branching. We develop an account of this based on the notion that subordination must be licensed through the discharge of a unique selectional requirement. The resulting theory predicts that symmetric structures, if they exist, will allow n-ary branching.We argue that this prediction is borne out. (i) Core properties of coordination can be explained if coordinate structures are symmetric. (ii) There is strong evidence that coordinate structures can be n-ary branching. This includes new evidence from the interpretation of attributive modifiers in multitermed coordinate structures. Finally, we show that a symmetric account of coordination permits a straightforward explanation of the distribution of coordinators in English.

Raising to object

“…) has the coindexed expressions in a sentence like (6) John i admires himself i correspond to a single indexed node in the graph that is the structural description of (6): we are simply calling the address ⦃John⦄ (and accessing the same semantic 2. Minimalist Grammars (Stabler, 2011) and some recent proposals such as Zyman (2023) and Neeleman et al (2023) assume that Merge is triggered by the need to satisfy selectional features, and do not work with unordered sets (Zyman's definition of Merge is explicitly graph-theoretic, although he builds classical trees). We will see, however, that in maintaining classical transformational assumptions about the format of structure building, the representations they produce fall short of accounting for the empirical paradigms analysed here in the same way as their settheoretic counterparts.…”