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Paratactic and subordinative So*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Jacob Hoeksema  and
Donna Jo Napoli
Jacob Hoeksema
Affiliation:
Faculteit der Letteren, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Postbus 716, 9700 AS Groningen, The Netherlands.
Donna Jo Napoli
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081USA.
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Extract

The contrast between subordination and co-ordination, from both a syntactic viewpoint and a semantic viewpoint, is assumed by most formal theories of grammar today, so much so that generally only avowed a-formalists or anti-formalists seriously entertain the possibility that any other type of relationship may exist between clauses. Yet paratactic constructions persist in nagging us, undermining precisely that contrast, sometimes competing with co-ordination, sometimes with subordination, for the same semantic niche in language. In this article we focus on one such case in English, that of complex sentences containing the degree-adverbs so or such in which one clause serves to indicate an extent to which the predicate modified by so/such holds and the other clause expresses a result. As we argue below, there are two types of complex sentences with this general characterization, one of which is of the paratactic kind and is exemplified in (I):

(I) I fainted, the sun was so hot.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , September 1993 , pp. 291 - 314
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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