Coordination in Minimalist Grammars: Excorporation and Across the Board (Head) Movement

This paper describes how coordination has been integrated into a broad coverage statistical Minimalist Grammar parser currently under development, and presents a unified analysis for a number of coordinate (and related) constructions sometimes considered problematic for transfor-mational syntax; these include across-the-board (ATB) head and phrasal movements, argument cluster coordination, right node raising and parasitic gaps. To accommodate all these structures, a number of novel extensions are introduced into the formalism, including a mechanism for excorporation which enables ATB head movement; this supplements a variant of Kobele's (2008) mechanism for ATB phrasal movement. The weak expressive power of the formalism is shown to be unaffected by these extensions.