Coreference in Non-constituent coordination

[Luis Casillas]

On Sat, May 18, 2002 at 04:28:55PM +0100, Dick Hudson wrote:

> At the risk of outstaying my welcome, how about these?
> (a)	After the examiners' meeting we'll know who passed and failed.

I don't know why I get this feeling that I'd find it easier to get
non-correferential readings when the conjuncts (a) exhaust the choices
in some semantic field ("pass and fail", "naughty and nice"), and (b) they
are really short.

I think (a) is alright.

> (b)	Who got the two departmental prizes? The students who came first in
> syntax and wrote the longest essay for semantics.

No.

> (c)	It was an Englishman who first climbed Everest and ran the first
> four-minute mile. (or: ... Englishmen)

This one I do marginally get with "Englishman".

> (d)	Most of the work was done by the girls, but a boy stood at the door and
> served behind the bar. (meaning the people who stood at the door or served
> behind the bar were boys).

Marginally, too.

I think there is something going on with types and tokens here.  I can
somewhat get (d) under the reading that at any given moment, there was
one boy in each of those two positions, drawn from some larger sets.  I
think it would be weird to say that sentence if there were two specific
boys in question.  As for (c), is that sentence really about the two
particular Englishpersons who accomplished those feats, or rather about
the heroic feats that the "generic Englishman" is capable of performing?

--
Luis Casillas
Department of Linguistics
Stanford University