Speaker: Danfeng Wu (University of Oxford)
Title: Syntax and prosody of coordination
Time: Thursday, February 9th, 12:30pm – 2pm
Abstract: In this talk I present a generalized syntactic analysis of coordination, with a focus on corrective but sentences (e.g., (1a-b)) as the case study. These sentences involve coordination by but, and require presence of negation in the first conjunct and absence of negation in the second (e.g., *Max eats spinach but chard; *Max doesn’t eat spinach but not chard).
(1) a. Max doesn’t eat spinach but chard. b. Max eats not spinach but chard.
Evidence based on scope suggests that negation has two positions in these sentences, though we only hear one. This analysis is consonant with previous proposals for focus-sensitive operators such as the Question-particle and only (e.g. Cable 2007; Hirsch 2017), suggesting that perhaps all focus-sensitive operators have two positions in a sentence. Then I argue using evidence involving constituency, scope and other phenomena that ellipsis can occur to obscure the positions of negation.
In addition to the syntactic-semantic arguments for ellipsis, I present evidence from a prosodic experiment, following a tradition in the literature that draws evidence for syntactic theories from prosodic evidence (e.g. Bresnan 1971; Clemens & Coon 2018). In this experiment, I show that this syntactic analysis makes predictions with measurable effects in prosodic phrasing. The experimental results also suggest that prosodic structure corresponds to syntactic structure more closely than some theories previously claimed.