another coordination example

Clai Rice cxr1086 at LOUISIANA.EDU
Fri Jul 30 20:18:31 UTC 2004


Perhaps you can specify your "unity" more by calling it
"metonymy" in this case. Especially in the given context,
it's clear that "the property" refers to the property on
which the hotel is currently sitting. One doesn't normally
"turn" property "into" a development, but one "develops (a)
property". You can test the metonymy by substituting
different related nouns:
"...the junk cars, which will be destroyed and the tires
recycled." Obviously here, the tires are on the cars.
Also, you can use normally unrelated nouns as a test:
"... the junk cars, which will be crushed and the birds
transferred to the sanctuary." Here, the birds must be
roosting in the cars. or
"...the hotel, which will be demolished and the lake filled
in" where I end up assuming that the hotel has a lake next
to it. That the second NP must be old information helps
guide this construal. Also, notice that a possessive pronoun
could be slipped in before the second NP: "...and its
property turned into", "and their tires recycled", "and
their birds transferred", "and its lake filled in".

Your other example seems to me more like English serial verb
periphrasis due to tense interaction and/or adverbial
modification:
*I'll give you some things that I went bought.
Later I'll give you some things that I'll go buy.
*Later I'll give you some things that I will go downtown buy.
Later I'll give you some things that I'll go downtown and buy.

Clai Rice

---------------------------------------------
arnold wrote:
here's another intriguing coordination example, from Randy
Jensen, "City looks to keep car dealers”, Palo Alto Daily
News 7/28/04, p. 2:

------
The concessions from the dealerships are an effort to help
maintain a sales tax base that has recently been rocked by
the potential loss of the Hyatt Rickeys, which will be
demolished and the property turned into a residential
development.
------

ok, let's take this apart.  the crucial part is the relative
clause: with its head -- (1) "Hyatt Rickeys, which will be
demolished and the property turned into a residential
development".  the relative clause itself can be paraphrased
as (2) "Hyatt Rickeys will be demolished and the property
turned into a residential development."

now, (2) is a pretty ordinary example of Gapping: "Hyatt
Rickeys will be demolished and the property [will be] turned
into a residential development."  a coordination of two
clauses, the second of which is missing (part of) its verbal
piece.

so how do we get the relative clause?  by "extraction" of
the NP "Hyatt Rickeys" from one of the two clauses of (2)
(the first).  (excuse the transformational terminology.)
but this is a violation of the Coordinate Structure
Constraint (from Ross's 1968 dissertation).  some might
think this was an insuperable problem.  but i don't find (1)
at all bad.

(see my Language Log posting at
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001266.html
for some other conflicts between theory and (my) judgments.)

what (1) feels like to me is some other well-known apparent
counterexamples to the CSC, like (3) "I'll give you some
things that I rushed downtown and bought".  (not Gapping,
but a more ordinary type of reduced coordination.)  the
usual observation about (3) is that what makes it ok is the
unity of the event denoted by "I rushed downtown and bought
[some things]."  and that kind of unity is there, i think,
in "Hyatt Rickey's will be demolished and the property [will
be] turned into a residential development."

this is a subtle point, and i'm not entirely sure what's
going on.  but (1) is a good bit better than, say, "Kim, who
ate sushi and Sandy ate sashimi", where the subevents are
not so easily unified.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)
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