edgy gapping of BE

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

from the Wikipedia entry for Ken Russell (http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Ken_Russell):

Prisoner of Honor marked Russell's final feature with Oliver Reed,
Mindbender was dismissed as propaganda for mentalist Uri Geller, and
Tracked (aka Dogboys) unrecognizable as a Russell film.
------

stripping away irrelevant stuff, we get:
   Mindbender was dismissed as propaganda, and Tracked unrecognizable
as a Russell film.

or, abstractly:
   [ Subj  [ WAS  VPpprt ]  ]  AND  [ Subj  AdjP ],
where the AdjP is to be interpreted in the same way as [  WAS
AdjP ].  that is, a passive VP is matched with a copular VP with an
ordinary predicate AdjP.

it seems to me that Gapping is pretty choosy here, and won't fly when
the two complements of BE are of different categories, even when
ordinary conjunction reduction is possible for these unlike
categories, as here:

   Mindbender was dismissed as propaganda and unrecognizable as a
Russell film in any case.
   Mindbender was unrecognizable as a Russell film and dismissed as
propaganda as well.

similarly with famous example types like
   Kim is a linguist and proud of it.
vs.
   *Kim is a linguist, and her parents proud of her as a result.
and
   The temperature is 70 degrees and rising.
vs.
   ??The temperature is 70 degrees and the barometric pressure falling.

no doubt i am discovering a well-known type of wheel here...

arnold

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org