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Either-Float and the Syntax of Co-or-dination

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Abstract

The syntax of either ... or ... treats the analyst to two main puzzles: the ‘either too high’ puzzle (either can be dissociated from the contrastive focus, surfacing in positions higher up the syntactic tree), and the ‘either too low’ puzzle (either is apparently too low in the tree, embedded inside the first disjunct). Covering data beyond the range of extant accounts, this paper presents an integrated solution to both puzzles. The paper’s central claim is that both either and or are phrasal categories. They originate in a position adjoined to their disjunct, to the contrastive focus or to a higher node on the ‘θ-path’ projected from the contrastive focus. Though either itself is immobile, its [+ NEG] counterpart, neither, can undergo phrasal movement from its base-generation site to a higher position in the tree, from which it triggers negative inversion; [+ WH] whether must move to SpecCP; and or and [+ NEG] nor must, if they are not base-generated there, front to the initial position in the second disjunct in order to be able to participate in a feature-checking relationship with the abstract head J(unction), the functional head that takes the second disjunct as its complement and the first disjunct as its specifier. The movement of whether, neither and (n)or will be diagnosed on the basis of the familiar restrictions on movement.

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  1. Linguistics Program CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10016–4309, USA

    Marcel Den Dikken

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Correspondence to Marcel Den Dikken.

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Part of the material for this paper was first presented in a seminar co-taught with Janet Fodor at the CUNY Graduate Center in the spring of 2003. An immediate predecessor of the present text was delivered at the 28th GLOW Colloquium in Geneva, Switzerland, on 1 April 2005. I thank the audiences present on both occasions for their generous feedback. I am very grateful to Anikó Lipták for carefully reading and meticulously commenting on earlier versions of the paper. Many thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewers for NLLT, as well as to editor Peter Culicover. Their invaluable input has led to substantial improvements of the analysis and to refinements of the empirical material. The responsibility for the final product is mine alone.

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Dikken, M.D. Either-Float and the Syntax of Co-or-dination. Nat Language Linguistic Theory 24, 689–749 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-005-2503-0

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