Subordination and coordination in syntax, semantics, and discourse: Evidence from the study of connectives

Abstract

This article discusses the question whether the distinction between subordination and coordination is parallel in syntax and discourse. Its main thesis is that subordination and coordination, as they are commonly understood in the linguistic literature, are genuinely syntactic concepts. The distinction between hierarchical and non-hierarchical connection in discourse structure, as far as it is defined clearly in the literature, is of a quite different nature. The syntax and semantics of connectives (as the most prominent morphosyntactic means by which subordination and coordination are encoded) offers little evidence to support the assumption of a structural parallelism between syntax and discourse. As a methodological consequence, sentence and discourse structure should not be mixed up in linguistic analysis.

Conjunction meaning can modulate parallelism facilitation: Eye-tracking evidence from German clausal coordination

“…When two clauses depend on a common superordinate verb, they belong together in the syntactic analysis; this plausibly strengthens their semantic coherence (see, e.g., Note: For NP1 and NP2, 'markedness' refers to the first clause; for the NP3 and NP4 regions, markedness was a constant. Matthiessen & Thompson, 1988; but see, Blühdorn, 2008), and might accentuate effects of conjunction meaning on clausal integration. The immediate vicinity of the conjunction and the target noun phrases together with the increased semantic coherence should thus facilitate effects of the conjunction on parallelism effects.…”

“…When two coordinands are the complements of a common superordinate verb, they depend on the same lexical item and share positions in the syntactic analysis. This could strengthen their semantic coherence (see, e.g., Matthiessen & Thompson, 1988; but see, Blühdorn, 2008) and accentuate effects of conjunction meaning on clausal integration and thereby parallelism effects.…”

Procesamiento de causalidad y contracausalidad: Interacciones entre estructura sintáctica y conocimiento del mundo en la comprensión de relaciones semánticas

“…Muchísimas han sido las perspectivas que abordaron el tema las llamadas 'relaciones de coherencia' en el discurso y, en general, existe acuerdo (Tordesillas, 1998;López García, 1999;Raiter, 2003) respecto de que las estructuras que verbalizan relaciones semánticas se encuentran en el límite entre la oración y el discurso, aunque los límites entre la oración y el discurso, históricamente, han sido tema de discusión (Graesser, 1981;van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983;van Dijk, 1992;Tordesillas, 1998;De Vega & Cuetos, 1999;Raiter, 2003;Givón, 2009;Dancygier & Sweetser, 2005;Blühdorn, 2008;Borzi, 2012;Duque, 2014; entre muchos otros) y el debate no parece saldado. En esta ocasión, tomaremos una perspectiva más 'oracional' o 'sintáctica' 1 , ya que pondremos especial foco en la sintaxis como variable de análisis, y dejaremos para otro trabajo la perspectiva 'textual' o 'discursiva'.…”

Recent Advances in Corpus Linguistics

“…The categories are classified in terms of syntactic functions, whereas subtypes are categorized according to the positional peculiarities of German sentence structure (see below). Blühdorn (2008a) generally distinguishes hierarchical and non-hierarchical connections, which are discussed from the perspective of syntax but also semantics and discourse structure. He argues that the type of discourse connection cannot be automatically derived from syntax and semantics, across languages.…”

“…Especially in the German literature, the first two types are not regarded as fully-fledged syntactic constituents as they have a zero position with respect to the two syntactic elements they connect (cf. Pasch et al 2003, Blühdorn 2008a. Coordinators and subordinators can be differentiated by the types of clauses they link: Coordinators indicate a linkage between main clauses (parataxis, see example 1) whereas subordinators connect a subordinate clause to its main clause (hypotaxis, see example 2).…”