Conclusion

Abstract

AbstractThe final chapter summarizes the choice points identified in the previous five chapters, and the interrelationships among them. We return to our dichotomy between ‘syntax calls the shots’ and ‘discourse calls the shots’, and emphasize that a complete analysis of the complex empirical patterns laid out in Chapters 2–6 will need a pluralistic approach, with full consideration given to the roles of syntax, discourse semantics, and the interface between the two, in addition to performance factors such as processing. The chapter concludes by listing several pieces of unfinished business, ranging from concrete empirical concerns (for instance, we have very little data on asymmetric extraction from coordinate structures in understudied languages) to theoretical implications, such syntactic and semantic similarities between conjuncts and adjuncts, and implications for syntactic theories of locality.