Apposition as Coordination: Evidence from Australian Languages

Using data from a range of Australian languages, in this paper we argue for an analysis of various nominal appositional structures as syntactic coordinations (i.e. as hybrid f-structures) in LFG. We show that this provides a simple and straightforward account of the surface syntactic similarities among a range of juxtaposed construction types, while the differences between the constructions can be accounted for in the mapping to the semantics. We propose meaning constructors to capture the semantic differences between coordination and apposition.