Oleg Belyaev: Coordination and subordination: Delimiting the domains, SOAS University of London

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• published: 25 Jul 2016
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https://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics/ This seminar titled "Coordination and subordination: Delimiting the domains" was given by Oleg Belyaev (Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences) at SOAS University of London on 24 February 2016 as part of the Linguistics Department Seminar Series. More about this event: https://goo.gl/oiEl3I The distinction between clause coordination and subordination and the status of constructions which cannot be assigned to one of these classes are much­discussed topics in linguistic literature. In spite of a wide variety of solutions having been proposed, there is still no analysis that can be deemed satisfactory. The most promising approach seems to be the multilevel analysis advocated in Culicover & Jackendoff (1997) and Yuasa & Sadock (2002). Within this approach, “coordination” and “subordination” are defined separately for syntax and semantics. Constructions which do not meet all of the criteria of either of these types are taken to involve mismatches in one of the directions. The “mixed” behaviour of such mismatching constructions is due to different tests corresponding to different levels. For example, linear order constraints belong to the domain of syntax, while the Coordinate Structure Constraint (CSC) is essentially semantic. However, the problem with this approach is that the two notions are not rigorously defined, and it is not always clear why a given test applies at a given level. Semantic definitions are especially controversial: for instance, it is well­known that asymmetry, long thought to be a defining feature of subordinating constructions, often applies equally well to coordination. In this talk, I will propose a reformulation of the multilevel approach to coordination and subordination in terms of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) based on two case studies: Ossetic causal and complement pseudocoordination (Belyaev 2014) and causal constructions. I will argue that three, not two, levels are needed in order to explain the behaviour of these constructions: c­structure (Yuasa & Sadock’s “syntax”), f­structure (Yuasa & Sadock’s “semantics”), and semantics proper. At the latter level, the key difference lies in the fact that coordinating constructions introduce discourse level rhetorical relations between speech acts, while subordinating constructions introduce logical assertions holding of two or more facts, events or propositions within a single speech act. References Belyaev, Oleg. 2014. Coordination and subordination at three levels of grammar. Journal of Linguistics FirstView, 1–60. Culicover, Peter W. & Ray Jackendoff. 1997. Semantic subordination despite syntactic coordination. Linguistic Inquiry 28 (2), 197–217. Yuasa, Etsuyo & Jerry M. Sadock. 2002. Pseudo­subordination: A mismatch between syntax and semantics. Journal of Linguistics 38 (1), 87–111.