another coordination example

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jul 30, 2004, at 1:18 PM, Clai Rice wrote, about my example "Hyatt
Rickeys, which will be demolished and the property turned into a
residentia deveopment"l:

> 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.

this is on the right track, i think, but the relationships can be of
various sorts.  if the junk cars were resting on a pile of tires, then
*those* tires are the ones that get recycled.  or if the birds have
been attacking the junk cars, then those are the birds that go to the
sanctuary.  the relationship is of association-in-context (the sort of
relationship that figures in the interpretation of novel N-N compounds
like "pumpkin bus"); associative relationships are metonymic, but i'm
not sure that using the label "metonymy" actually advances things.

> ...Your other example seems to me more like English serial verb
> periphrasis due to tense interaction and/or adverbial
> modification...

it's representative of a much larger class of phenomena, not all
involving sort-of-serial verbs.  neal whitman has pointed me to an
extensive discussion of a variety of CSC violations in chapter 5
("Coherence and Extraction") of andrew kehler's Coherence, Reference,
and the Theory of Grammar (Stanford CA: CSLI, 2002).  nice stuff, with
an extensive review of the literature (though i'm pretty sure there's a
nice piece by dwight bolinger that kehler missed, only i can't recall
the details right now; this was the mystery reference i was alluding to
in my original posting).  as far as i can see, it doesn't look at
examples like my Gapping sentence; in fact, kehler argues that Gapping
requires across-the-board extraction.  but i think he could accommodate
it.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)