ErgSemantics_Coordination

ESD Test Suite Examples

Abrams and Browne arrived.
Abrams, Browne, and Chiang arrived.
The dog and cat arrived.
The dog, cat, and picture arrived.
My friend and colleague arrived.
Abrams barked and was old.
Abrams arrived, barked, and was old.
Abrams arrived and the dog barked.
Abrams wanted and expected to arrive.
The old and fierce dog barked.
The dog is old and fierce.
The dog barked on Monday and on Wednesday.

Linguistic Characterization

Coordination of two phrases introduces a relation which takes two arguments; in coordination of nominal phrases these are the index of the left and right conjuncts, while in all other coordination the two arguments are the handles of the two conjuncts. N-ary coordination introduces an additional conjunction relation for each additional conjunct, working from right to left, in each step taking as arguments the index or handle of the new conjunct and that of the conjoined phrase to its right.

Motivating Examples

• Clear examples in cases of constructions difficult to differentiate in some cases, e.g. instrumental relatives v. purposives
• Include negative examples: strings that seem similar a priori but in fact do not represent the phenomenon. Such examples should help clarify the boundary of the phenomenon in question.

MRS Fingerprints

Nominal coordination:

conj(ARG0 x1, L-INDEX x2, R-INDEX x3)
h4:_(ARG0 x2)
h5:_(ARG0 x3)

Non-nominal coordination:

conj(ARG0 e1, L-HNDL h2, R-HNDL h3)
h2:_(ARG0 e4)
h3:_(ARG0 e5)

Interactions

• Across-the-board extraction
• Right-node raising

Reflections

• Implicit conjunction -- Lexical conjunctions each introduce a relation which serves for binary coordination, and in n-ary coordination, an implicit_conj relation is used for each additional conjunct.

• Identity in N-bar coordination -- One interpretation of N-bar coordination as in my friend and colleague has the two nouns referring to the same individual; this is expressed in the corresponding MRS by use of an additional id relation taking the two referential indices as arguments.

• N-bar coordination -- Note that for each nominal conjunct, a separate quantifier relation is introduced to bind the referential index which is the inherent argument of that conjunct, where for coordination of NPs, each NP supplies its own quantifier; in N-bar coordination, the coordination construction introduces a udef_q relation for each of the two conjuncts.

Open Questions

• The current analysis only accommodates constituent coordination, where each of the conjuncts is of the same broad syntactic category. So far, this does not extend to coordination of predicate nominals with other predicative phrases, as in My friend is a Republican and proud of it, even though the current analysis does admit My friend is in Washington and proud of it.

Grammar Version

• 1212.

More Information

• ErgSemantics main page

• Inventory of semantic phenomena (to be) documented

• How to cite this work