Semantics and Pragmatics of English Verbal Dependent Coordination

This article investigates coordination of verbal adjuncts and complements in English, considering coordinations of adjunct with adjunct, complement with complement, and adjunct with complement, for both non-WH and WH elements, using the conjunctions or, and, and but. Previous analyses have never to my knowledge covered all of these cases. It is shown that syntactic or (compositional) semantic constraints on coordination fail to cover all the facts, as do ambiguity-based explanations. Better (though still incomplete) coverage is provided by an analysis based on event semantics and neo-Gricean conversational implicature.