COMITATIVE AND PLURAL PRONOUN CONSTRUCTIONS

ANNA FELDMAN

Abstract

Proceedings of IATL 17
Russian has two different means of combining two noun phrases to form a plural noun phrase : the coordinate construction, using the conjunction i 'and' and the comitative phrase, using the preposition s/so 'with'. This paper establishes the distinction between three types of comitative phrase: adjunction, s-coordination and plural pronoun complementation. Evidence for the distinction comes from reflexivization, extraction, agreement patterns, discontinuity phenomena and semantic interpretation.
The paper shows that ordinary and s-coordination are two independent syntactic structures. In s-coordination, it is the nominal head s that selects two complements, whereas in ordinary coordination the conjunction i is a marker. This structural difference explains the difference in the behavior of the two constructions with respect to possessive pronouns.



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