Lucas Champollion (New York): Man and woman: the last obstacle for boolean coordination

This is an extended version of the Amsterdam Colloquium 2013 talk with the same title.

 

The word “and” can be used both for “boolean” intersection (“John lies and cheats”) and for “non-boolean” collective formation (“John and Mary met in the park”). A major theme in the literature on coordination is the quest for a unified lexical entry. This talk argues that the boolean option is basic, focusing on conjunction in the English DP (“That liar and cheat can not be trusted”, “A man and woman met in the park”). The boolean account immediately delivers the intersective behavior of “and”. Building on seminal work by Gazdar (1980) and Winter (2001), I argue that the collective behavior falls out of its interaction with independently motivated type shifters. Essentially, "man and woman" is interpreted in a similar fashion to "a man and a woman". This talk will feature an introduction to the framework of flexible boolean semantics originally developed by Winter (2001), and time permitting, an extension of the boolean account to coordination of plurals ("ten men and women"), other languages (French: *Ce marin et soldat sont souvent ensemble), and hydras (the man and woman who met in the park).