Coordination and Parallelism in Glue Semantics: Integrating Discourse Cohesion and the Element Constrain

We present initial work on a theory of coordination and parallelism in Glue Semantics (GLUE; Dalrymple 1999, 2001). We will explore points of convergence and divergence between our approach to coordination and similar Categorial Grammar (CG) approaches. We also compare our approach to a previous GLUE approach to coordination (Kehler et al. 1995, 1999) and argue that our approach is superior on the grounds that it preserves a very strong notion of resource-sensitivity (Dalrymple et al. 1993). We conclude by discussing parallelism in connection with the Coordinate Structure Constraint (CSC; Ross 1967). The CSC is a putatively robust condition on extraction which has been argued to be a feature of the CG approach to coordination and of other related approaches. It is standardly assumed to have two parts, the Conjunct Constraint and the Element Constraint (Grosu 1973). The Conjunct Constraint is quite robust, but the Element Constraint has been challenged repeatedly, most recently by Kehler (2002), who argues that the CSC is not a syntactic condition, but rather follows from conditions on discourse coherence and parallelism. We discuss a constraint language on the structure of GLUE derivations, and show how Kehler's theory of discourse cohesion can be related to parallelism in such derivations.