Russell Lee-Goldman
UC Berkeley

Jackendoff and Culicover (in chapter 13 of "Simpler Syntax") examine the "conditional-and" construction (e.g., "look a little closer and you'll understand"), and examine a range of syntactic data that suggest that the "and" creates a syntactic coordination but a semantic subordination. This is in service of arguments for (1) autonomous, mismatch-tolerant syntax and semantics modules, and (2) a reconsideration of the nature of syntactic constraints, e.g., the coordinate structure constraint of Ross 1967.

I'll lead us through the main points of the chapter, and further present some data that I (and friends) have been collecting that may illustrate the opposite: syntactic subordination with semantic coordination.