Orth & Yoshida (2023) note the existence of something that looks like gapping inside NPs, where the head noun can be missing in the second conjunct, stranding an A-PP sequence:
(1) I interviewed every candidate possible in this group and promising in that group.
Orth & Yoshida (2023) analyze this as ATB movement of N to D, with coordination of NPs below a single D. As they show, the A must linearly follow the head noun in the first conjunct, which they analyze as movement of N to D across the A. In their footnote 15, they dismiss a possible alternative analysis, one based on the prosodic deletion analysis that I proposed for non-constituent coordination in Bruening (2015). Their dismissal is based on two statements, both of which seem to be false.
First, Orth & Yoshida (2023) state that there is no contrastive prosody in the examples they examine, like (1). Nothing could be further from the truth. The two As are contrastive, as are the two PPs, and, in my judgment at least, heavy contrastive stress has to go on possible and promising in (1).
Second, they state that the examples of non-constituent coordination in Bruening (2015) involve deletion of all the non-head elements of the coordination, whereas in their examples, it is the head noun that would have to be deleted. This seems to be based on a confusion of syntactic and prosodic categories. In Bruening (2015), the deletion rule targets the first phonological phrase after and and deletes all but the head of that phonological phrase, where the head is a prosodic constituent (a prosodic word, typically). This rule actually seems like it would give a perfect analysis of examples like (1): (every candidate (promising)) would be a phonological phrase with head (promising), and all but the head would be deleted. Subsequent material, here the PP, is not affected, so the output would be exactly what is observed after and in (1).
This analysis would explain all of the facts discussed by Orth & Yoshida (2023). The word order requirement falls out, because prosodic constituents in English are right-headed. The limitation to coordination falls out, because non-constituent coordination is also limited to coordination contexts.
The two analyses also make different predictions about the co-occurrence of prenominal and postnominal adjectives. In my judgment, the deletion is acceptable when both are present:
(2) I interviewed every available candidate possible in this group and promising in that group.
Orth & Yoshida (2023) predict this sentence to be ungrammatical, since the head noun candidate has evidently not moved across the first A available in the first conjunct. I conclude that the prosodic deletion analysis in Bruening (2015) is actually a better analysis for this set of data than the ATB movement analysis proposed by Orth & Yoshida.
References
Bruening, Benjamin (2015). Non-Constituent Coordination: Prosody, Not Movement. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Penn Linguistics Conference. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics. Available at https://repository.upenn.edu/bitstreams/a1437ea1-75de-4b2d-9b01-d6364582c35e/download.
Orth, Wesley and Masaya Yoshida (2023). There is Something Missing in NP and Moving in DP. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 41: 1509-1527.
