Apparent Gapping in NPs (Orth & Yoshida 2023)

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.

Selectional Violations in Coordination and Processing

Sentences like You can depend on my assistant and that he will be on time (Sag et al. 1985) have been heavily discussed in the literature on coordination.  They are interesting because the second conjunct, a CP, is not allowed as the object of a preposition (for many speakers of English).  So *You can depend on that he will be on time is judged to be deviant (see Bruening 2025 for experimental verification of these judgments).  Bruening & Al Khalaf (2020) and Bruening (2025) analyze the saving effect of coordination as arising from a null N.  In You can depend on my assistant and that he will be on time, the CP is actually an NP, with a null N head.  The null N head is not allowed when the CP occurs in object position by itself, because it is semantically contentless; see the two works cited for details.

Kim & Lu (2024) propose instead that the acceptability of You can depend on my assistant and that he will be on time is a grammaticality illusion.  The idea is that the language processor basically forgets the selectional requirements of depend on by the time it gets to the CP.  Kim & Lu (2024) point out that in coordinations of three phrases, like The success of the project depends on [a good engineering design], [the diligence of the workers], and [that the contractors will do their part], the null N analysis predicts that the CP should be equally grammatical as either the second or the third conjunct.  In contrast, the processing theory would predict that acceptability would increase with distance, so that a CP would be judged better as the third conjunct than as the second.  Kim & Lu (2024) run an acceptability study and find that, indeed, a CP is judged better as the third conjunct than as the second.  They argue that this is evidence for the processing account.

There are two reasons that this is not correct.  First, it is true that in the null N analysis, there is no difference in grammaticality between the second and third conjuncts: a CP would be equally well-formed in both positions, according to the grammar.  This does not mean that naive participants in an experiment will judge them that way, though.  We know from decades of research that acceptability judgments in experiments involve many factors besides the grammar.  Increased complexity is known to lower acceptability judgments, for instance.  So Kim & Lu's (2024) findings are not direct evidence against the null N theory (or any grammar theory).

Second, the grammaticality illusion analysis incorrectly predicts that all kinds of selectional violations should be acceptable in coordination.  If the processor basically forgets what categories are allowed by the time a non-initial conjunct is reached, a non-initial conjunct should be able to be any category.  Bruening & Al Khalaf (2020) showed that this is not true.  For instance, the semantically contentless preposition of that is allowed in nominalizations (the destruction of two of the towns) is not allowed in second or third conjuncts with conjoined arguments of verbs: *They destroyed all the cities and of two of the towns. *They destroyed the world famous library, the lighthouse that was an engineering marvel, and of the hanging gardens.  See Bruening & Al Khalaf (2020) for further examples involving other categories.  The processing theory would have to be modified so that the processor can forget selectional requirements just when a non-initial conjunct is a CP.  This does not seem like a reasonable modification, since forgetting A should not depend on what B is encountered later.

I conclude that, while there might be a role for processing in selectional violations in coordination, Kim & Lu (2024) have not shown that the best analysis is in terms of a grammaticality illusion.  Their findings are also not problematic for grammar-based theories like that of Bruening & Al Khalaf (2020) and Bruening (2025).

References

Bruening, Benjamin (2025). Selectional Violations in Coordination (A Response to Patejuk and Przepiorkowski 2023). Linguistic Inquiry 56: 439-483.

Bruening, Benjamin and Eman Al Khalaf (2020). Category Mismatches in Coordination Revisited. Linguistic Inquiry 51: 1-38.

Kim, Nayoun and Jiayi Lu (2024). Coordination of Unlike Categories Creates Grammaticality Illusion.  Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 24: 52-61.

Sag, Ivan et al. (1985). Coordination and How to Distinguish Categories. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 3: 117-171.