Workshop on Coordination and Agreement

Peter Peterson

Abstract

Coordination has proved to be a bugbear for all theories of syntax of all persuasions for nearly 50 years. It seems, however, that LFG provides a framework that allows us to give an adequate and economical account of coordination. Recent accounts of the syntax of coordination support an analysis in which the f-structure of a coordination is a set of the f-structures of the individual conjuncts. Under certain specified conditions, grammatical information distributes to all members of the set. While we agree on these basic assumptions, there are differences of approach that make different claims about the model and different predictions about what kind of data we are likely to encounter. A particularly interesting area of debate centres on the analysis of agreement phenomena involving coordinate structures. This workshop will provide the opportunity to see how much we have in common, to highlight differences in our approaches, and, more positively, to explore where we can build for future research.