Open AccessReconsidering the coordinate structure constraint in Japanese and Korean: Syntactic constraint or pragmatic principle?
Author(s) -
Yūsuke Kubota,
Jungmee Lee
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2008.24
Subject(s) - constraint (computer aided design) , linguistics , computer science , syntactic structure , syntax , mathematics , natural language processing , philosophy , geometry
Whether the Coordinate Structure Constraint (CSC) (Ross, 1967) is asyntactic constraint has been discussed much in the literature. Thispaper reconsiders this issue by drawing on evidence from Japanese andKorean. Our examination of the CSC patterns in relative clauses inthe two languages reveals that a pragmatically-based approach alongthe lines of Kehler (2002) predicts the relevant empirical patternsstraightforwardly whereas alternative syntactic approaches run intomany problems. We take these results to provide strong support forthe view that the CSC is a pragmatic principle rather than a syntacticconstraint.