Variable agreement and the structure of coordination

Abstract

Modern formal approaches to syntax propose different underlying structures for coordinate constructions. At the same time, none of them describe the entire set of properties of coordination, including variable predicate agreement in number (and gender). The goal of the paper is to define the internal organization of coordinate phrases. As the study of examples from the Russian treebank demonstrates, in addition to the previously known factors, the choice of agreement strategy is also influenced by the linear length of conjuncts and the distance between them and the verbal head. Additionally, the strategy of matching the nearest (and not necessarily the first) conjunct is relevant for Russian. We present and analyze the corpus data and conclude that there is no hierarchical organization in coordination. This lets us elaborate on some general ideas about syntactic derivation put forward by Noam Chomsky.