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Conjunction, cumulation and respectively readings1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2012

RUI P. CHAVES
RUI P. CHAVES*
Affiliation:
Linguistics Department, University at Buffalo – SUNY
*
Author's address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260–1030, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

So-called respectively readings have posed serious challenges for theories of syntax and semantics. Sentences like George and Martha respectively denounced and were denounced by the governor (McCawley 1998) show that although the conjoined verbal expressions share the same syntactic subject, they do not predicate that subject in the same way; George (not Martha) denounced the governor, and Martha (but not George) was denounced by the governor. Postal (1998: 160–163) and Gawron & Kehler (2004: 193–194) show that this phenomenon poses problems for contemporary theories of grammar and argue that it is particularly acute for theories where subcategorization and predication are linked via unification. As these authors note, the problem is even more severe in respectively readings involving filler–gap constructions. In this paper I argue that the severity of these problems has been overstated and that the data do not entail any special dissociation between predication, subcategorization, or extraction. In this paper I propose an account which is fully compatible with unification-based theories of grammar. Gawron & Kehler (2004) propose an account of respectively phenomena which covers a remarkably wide range of cases. That approach relies on a Respf operator, which it stipulated to be optionally overt. However, I argue that this analysis is problematic because there are significant semantic differences between respectively readings with and without an overt realization of ‘respectively’. Rather, the data suggest that respectively readings may be special cases of more general phenomena which happen to create interpretations that are compatible with the semantics of the adverb respectively. This explains why respectively readings can arise without the adverb, and does not require us to posit a disconnect between predication and subcategorization. In fact, a sentence with a respectively reading will not differ in syntactic or semantic structure from sentences without such a reading.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , July 2012 , pp. 297 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

[1]

I am grateful to the anonymous referees of the Journal of Linguistics for their comments and criticism. I also thank the audiences and referees of the conferences where previous versions of this work were presented, namely the 17th Biennial Conference of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand (University of Waikato), and the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Thanks is also due to Brian Grom for assistance searching the Google's N-Gram corpus.

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