Syntactic Layer of Coordination and Conjuncts Agreement: Evidence from Pakistani English Newspapers

Abstract

The architectural spin of linguistic elements is schematized as a projection from the lexicon and is considered as the universal machinery to account for all the linguistic phenomena according to generativist dictums. Pakistani English newspapers are ever under investigation from various linguistic angles, such as discourse analysis, code mixing, syntactic features, etc., but coordination and its agreement have always been ignored among Pakistani scholars. In the current study, the internal syntactic layer of conjoined phrases, clauses, and sentences has been hierarchically envisaged using empirical evidence from Pakistani English newspapers. This study adopts qualitative designed research and takes Murphy and Puškar (2018) as a framework to analyse coordination and agreement patterns in newspaper discourse. According to this framework, there are some syntactic operations (merge, agree, move) and steps to conjoin the phrases, clauses, and sentences in a uniform way. This study proposes that coordination and agreement are the recursive processes within the generative paradigm. The study furthermore predicts that the patterns of agreement within conjoined phrases, clauses, and sentences are first conjunct agreement (FCA), and last conjunct agreement (LCA) on various positions: subjective and objective conjoined expressions have been investigated, and these agreement patterns are due to the gender (p) and number (#) agreement.