NP conjoining

[Nina Dobrushina or Michael Daniel]

Dear Edith, this is in connection to your NP conjunction question.

In Russian, NPs connected with the "s" preposition show some properties of NP conjoining, i.e.
[NP "s" NP]
rather than
[NP PrepP]

There was an article by Paul Garde for Russian, and I wrote a small piece about this, too. And lately (actually two days before now) there was Kostja Kazenin's talk about the same thing at the Third Winter Typological School, which, apart from Russian, also includes Chuvash data.
Now, what is important to your query, is that this construction only shows these properties when both nouns are animate. If you have animate + inanimate it a comitative rather than conjunction, and consequently [NP PrepP] rather than [NP "s" NP]. This holds true at least for Russian; you should ask Kostja whether the same is true of Chuvash.

Misha Daniel