Coordination and binary branching

Abstract

In “Subordination and Binary Branching”, a recent (2023) Syntax paper, Ad Neeleman and colleagues proposed a new analysis of subordination. The main aim of this paper is to refute that analysis, using data from the coordination of unlike categories and unlike grammatical functions. Additionally, building on Neeleman et al.'s observations about the arbitrarily -ary—not just binary—nature of coordination, I sketch a more Minimalist approach to subordination and coordination that is devoid of the problems that Neeleman et al.'s analysis faces, but otherwise covers a similar range of data. On this approach, “subordination” is a synonym of “result of PairMerge” and “coordination” is a synonym of “result of SetMerge”, where SetMerge is understood as an operation creating an arbitrary set, as opposed to the usual more specialized Merge operation, which creates a binary set.