Nonconstituent Coordination in Japanese as Constituent Coordination: An Analysis in Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar

Nonconstituent coordination poses a particularly challenging problem for standard kinds of syntactic theories in which the notion of phrase structure (or constituency) is taken to be a primitive in some way or other. Previous approaches within such theories essentially equate nonconstituent coordination with coordination of full-fledged clauses at some level of grammatical representation. I present data from Japanese that pose problems for such approaches and argue for an alternative analysis in which the apparent nonconstituents are in fact surface constituents having full-fledged meanings, couched in a framework called Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar (Kubota 2010, Kubota and Levine 2012, Kubota 2014).