Selectional Violations in Coordination (A Response to Patejuk and Przepiórkowski to appear)

Bruening and Al Khalaf (2020) showed that selectional violations in coordination are extremely limited (there are exactly two) and exactly match those that are permitted in ellipsis and displacement. Patejuk and Przepiórkowski (to appear) criticize Bruening and Al Khalaf (2020) on numerous fronts. They do successfully show that conjuncts do not need to match in syntactic category, but their dismissal of the selectional violation data does not succeed. I present additional data, including the results of three large-scale acceptability surveys, that show that the two violations of selectional restrictions are real and are fully general. The two patterns that need an analysis are coordinations of NP&CP appearing where CPs are banned, and Adv&AP appearing in prenominal position where adverbs are banned. I propose a variation on the analysis of Bruening and Al Khalaf (2020) that accounts for all of the facts and which meets Patejuk and Przepiórkowski’s objections.