LINGUIST List 4.636

Thu 26 Aug 1993

Sum: Coordination of Null Pronominal

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1. Karen Wallace, Summary: Coordination of null pronominal

Many thanks to everyone who responded to my question about references
and data on coordination of a null pronominal with a nonnull NP.
My interest is motivated by the presence of this phenomenon in Crow
(Siouan) and its apparent rarity elsewhere.

The following people offered judgments, data, and discussion: Henning
Andersen (Russian), Lars Borin (Finnish), Richard Cameron (Spanish),
Clancy Clements (Spanish), Alexis Dimitriadis (Greek), Picus Sizhi Ding
(Chinese), Kevin Donnelly (Scottish Gaelic), David Gil (Hebrew, Tagalog,
Russian), Jorge Hankamer (Turkish), Fran Karttunen (Finnish), Laila
Lalami (Classical and Moroccan Arabic), siegellili3.uni-bielefeld.de
(Japanese), Tang Sze Wing (Cantonese), and Larry Trask (Turkish).

It seems that in most of these languages, if there is NP coordination
distinct from comitative "with", it is impossible to coordinate the
null pronominal with an overt NP. The one exception to this was
Scottish Gaelic, in which the facts are similar to Irish; Cantonese
is another possible exception (more data is needed).

However, many people offered data and suggestions regarding a similar
construction involving comitative "with". In many null pro languages,
it is possible to say something like "with Terry left[1pl]", meaning
either "Terry and I left" or "Terry and we left". (In this regard,
note that NP coordination in Crow is quite distinct syntactically from
the construction which translates comitative "with").

The following references were suggested (from Michael Barlow, Jim
McCloskey, Louise McNally, siegellili3.uni-bielefeld.de, and Thomas
Mueller-Bardey):

- on West Greenlandic: Fortescue 1984:128 in "West Greenlandic".
- several papers by Schwartz, for example "Asymmetric Feature
 Distribution in Pronominal Coordination, in Barlow and Ferguson
 (eds. 1988) Agreement in Natural Language, CSLI.
- Aissen 1989 (Language 65.3) for references and discussion of this
 phenomenon in Tzotzil.
- Jaklin Kornfilt ... had a ms. from around 1990 or 1991 ... she
 (unlike Aissen) analyzes the Turkish counterpart of this construction
 as a symmetric coordination ... Aissen argues instead that the "pro"
 is plural rather than singular.
- McCloskey reanalyzed some of his data in light of Aissen and
 Schwartz's work in an unpublished ms. which is also cited in the
 Aissen paper.
- Schwartz, Linda 1988, "Conditions for verb-coded coordinations".
 Michael Hammond et al. (eds.), <Studies in syntactic typology.>
 Amsterdam: Benjamins (TSL, 17); pp. 53-73.
- Kameyama (1985): "Zero Anaphora: The Case of Japanese".
- McCloskey: a subsequent paper about Old Irish in the Festschrift
 for Bill Shipley edited by Sandy Chung and Jorge Hankamer.
- the recent work by Josef Aoun, Dominique Sportiche and
 Elias Benmamoun on (some varieties of) Arabic.

Anyone who would like to see a longer summary of the responses
can get one by sending me a request. I'd also be happy to discuss
the construction further with anyone who is interested.

Karen Wallace
wallacecognet.ucla.edu