Relativized Parallelism in Mandarin Chinese Natural Coordination

Abstract

Conjuncts of natural coordination are semantically related, in contrast to those of accidental coordination. It is generally assumed that no single conjunct may be moved and no element may be extracted from a single conjunct. Focusing on Chinese he/gen constructions, this paper first argues that not only post-verbal, but also preverbal he and gen in comitative constructions are coordinators, and thus form constructions of natural coordination, and then presents the following correlation: on the one hand, single conjuncts may move in natural coordination and elements may also be extracted from single conjuncts of natural coordination; and on the other hand, single conjuncts may not move in accidental coordination, nor may elements be extracted from single conjuncts of accidental coordination. This correlation reveals a relativized parallelism in coordinate constructions: syntactic operations applied to single conjuncts are possible only when the conjuncts of a coordinate complex are semantically related to each other. The paper then tries to account for this relativized parallelism from an economy perspective of language processing.