[HPSG-L] Query about coordination

Shuichi Yatabe shuichi.yatabe at gmail.com
Tue Jan 21 06:29:03 UTC 2025


Dear all,

I would like to thank everyone who has emailed me in reply to my query.
Below, I will try to summarize the information and the comments that I have received.

My query was about sentences like 
"Jan travels to Rome tomorrow, to Paris on Friday, and will fly to Tokyo on Sunday"
and
"Jan wanted to study medicine when he was 11, law when he was 13, and to study
nothing at all when he was 18," discussed in Beavers and Sag (2004).

Anna Kupsc and Adam Przepiórkowski say that sentences like these are possible in Polish.
Adam in fact says that they sound perfectly fine to him.

Emanuel Quadros says that sentences like these are possible in Brazilian Portuguese,
and lists the following sentences:
(1) Jan vai viajar pra Roma amanhã, pra Paris na sexta, e vai viajar pra Tóquio no domingo.
(2) Jan queria estudar medicina quando tinha 11 anos, direito quando tinha 13, e não estudar nada quando tinha 18 anos.

Petya Osenova says that sentences like these look possible and okay in Bulgarian.

And Dick Hudson mentions the possibility that sentences like these are strictly ungrammatical
and that such sentences are often written because human memory loses track of coordination.
I think this possibility remains open as long as we cannot find a language in which this kind of
sentence is categorically prohibited. (Japanese, which I mentioned in my original query, does
not count as such a language, since the Japanese equivalents of the sentences in question
involve right-node raising instead of left-node raising, and are therefore expected to be handled
differently by the human parsing mechanism.)

I look forward to learning more about this issue from posts to this mailing list, from private emails,
and from published papers.

Thank you.

Shuichi Yatabe



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