THE PHENOMENON OF COORDINATION: TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN

• Grant number: 12/18212-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: December 01, 2012
• End date: February 28, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Ana Paula Scher
• Grantee: Rafael Dias Minussi
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research project aims at investigating the phenomenon of coordination through the study of coordinated sentences, already widely described and analyzed in the literature (see Ross, 1967; MUNN, 1993; XIMENES, 2002; CHAVES, 2007), and the so-called coordinated compounds (see OLSEN, 2001, 2004;PADROSA-TRIAS, 2010), bringing together these two types of construction. The specific aim is to propose a unified treatment for these coordinated expressions that takes the following into account: (i) the presence or absence of a head, (ii) recursion, (iii) extraction (syntactic and semantic) constraint of a member and (iv) identity constraints (grammatical class of coordinated elements). To do so, we assume the theoretical framework of Distributed Morphology (henceforth, DM) (see MARANTZ, 1997) that will allow us to treat coordinated structures syntactically and, consequently, to investigate whether the same restrictions/operations involved in the formation of coordinated sentences also operate in the coordinated compound formation. This framework will also enable us to investigate what the restrictions/operations that actually are involved in the formation of these structures are. Theoretically, this research project aims at expanding the current knowledge of the scope of the Encyclopedia (List 3) and also of the encyclopedic content consulted through the derivation (root features or world knowledge) for the proper semantic formation of coordinated structures.