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Pseudo-Coordination and Multiple Agreement Constructions
Edited by Giuliana Giusti, Vincenzo Nicolò Di Caro and Daniel Ross
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 274] 2022
► pp. 149–166

Chapter 6
The properties of the ‘(a) lua și X’ (‘take and X’) construction in Romanian

Evidence in favor of a more fine-grained distinction among pseudocoordinative structures

ORCID logo | University of Bucharest
This paper presents a preliminary classification of the verbal structure (a) lua și X (‘(to) take and X’) in Romanian, showing that it represents a special case of pseudocoordination. The structure behaves differently from both coordination structures and other pseudocoordination structures with respect to the tests proposed by de Vos (2005) and Ross (2013) (e.g. the Coordinate Structure Constraint, coordinator substitution, semantic bleaching, VP-deletion, etc.), as shown by an exploratory acceptability judgment task with 52 native speakers of Romanian testing for 16 structural properties. The results suggest that the existing classification of pseudocoordination structures should be revisited in order to accommodate Romanian ‘take’ as an additional type.
Keywords: classification, pseudocoordination, (pseudo)coordination tests
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Acceptability judgment task: Materials and procedure
  • 3.Tests for classification as pseudocoordination
    • 3.1Syntactic tests
      • 3.1.1The Coordinate Structure Constraint
      • 3.1.2XP interrupting the verbal string
      • 3.1.3VP-deletion
      • 3.1.4Substituting conjunction with disjunction
      • 3.1.5Changing the order of the conjuncts
    • 3.2Semantic tests
      • 3.2.1Compatibility with impersonal subjects
      • 3.2.2Semantic bleaching
      • 3.2.3Semantic subordination
      • 3.2.4Event structure modification
      • 3.2.5Wide scope reading of the quantifier
      • 3.2.6The absence of counterexpectational readings
    • 3.3Morphological and phonological tests
  • 4.Syntactic analysis
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 16 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.274.06ble
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