Elliptic coordination

Abstract

Proposals are made to expand and refine previous analyses of coordination in Cognitive Grammar. The account presupposes a number of general notions established independently: (i) flexible symbolic assemblies (rather than constituency) as the basis for describing grammar; (ii) a dynamic view of structure (as patterns of activity occurring in windows of attention on different time scales); (iii) a metaphor involving access, activation, and conceptual overlap (to complement the standard compositional metaphor); and (iv) various kinds of abstraction (including schematicity, the type/instance distinction, and the invocation of virtual entities). Coordination is characterized as the mental juxtaposition of entities conceived as being analogous. These notions are first employed to describe the conjoining of constituents, including clauses. Non-constituent coordination is analyzed in the context of other sorts of clausal “reduction”, including the accentual reduction of unfocused elements in English as well as ellipsis, where overlapping content is left unexpressed. A pivotal descriptive notion is the differential, i.e. the content appearing in one clausal window that does not appear in the prior window. The anti-differential consists of any previously active content that the differential conflicts with and suppresses. Non-constituent coordination is a special case of ellipsis where the differential and anti-differential function as conjuncts.