Two Kinds of Ellipsis in English Coordinate Structures

This paper shows that Right-Node Raising and its mirror image, Argument Cluster Coordination, are fundamentally different phenomena, and provides evidence that the range of constructions in which Right-Node Raising may occur is much wider than usually assumed in the literature. We argue that this phenomenon is best captured as ellipsis of prosodic units under semantic and phonological identity. Argument Cluster Coordination on the other hand, is syntactically restricted and does not require phonological identity. Our analysis of the phenomena is couched in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994), augmented with linearization domains (Reape (1994, 1996), Kathol 1995). Here, the relevant constraints can be integrated in a natural way given that these various levels of description are incrementally construed, and are locally and simultaneously available.