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.