Workshop on Coordination, Subordination and Ellipsis

This is an effect that belongs to the process that maps the hierarchical groupings of syntactic representations onto strings. The process that produces Right Node Raising, then, should engage that process in such a way that the Right Edge Effect emerges. I will assume that the relevant process is the one that linearizes the terminals in a phrase marker. There have been a series of recent proposals that attempt to explicate how Right Node Raising interacts with linearization to produce the Right Edge Effect, and this will be another. Sabbagh (forthcoming) gives a movement account of Right Node Raising, and tries to show how movement and the linearization scheme interact to produce the Right Edge Effect. Wilder (forthcoming), Bachrach and Katzir (2006) and Frampton (2006) conceive of phrase markers that allow multidominance — the ability for one node to have more than one mother — and try to formulate a linearization scheme that gives Right Node Raising as a consequence of multidominance. Fox and Pesetsky (2006) combines the two ideas. What I will propose comes closest, perhaps, to Fox and Pesetsky (2006). At its heart is the idea of multidominance, and so it does not offer a new attack on the problem. Mymethod, though, will differ a little frommy predecessors. I will begin by examining the linearization scheme in a general way and try to locate the properties that such a scheme should have. I will argue that whether multidominance is permitted or not depends on the linearization scheme. Once we have a linearization scheme of the sort that has the properties I argue it should have, it will license multidominance as a result. I will then examine how close it gets to capturing the properties of Right Node Raising, including the Right Edge Effect. It gets very close. By contrast, the other proposals that make use of multidominance have assumed that multidominance is permitted and designed linearization schemes that produce Right Node Raising in cases where it arises. Our results differ. I’ll start, then, with an examination of the linearization scheme.