Different and Proud of It: A TAG Perspective on the Coordination of Unlike Categories

This paper presents an analysis of sentences featuring superficial coordinations of unlike categories in English, such as John is a Republican and proud of it (NP and AP) and Pat is stupid and a liar (AP and NP). We argue that, despite the fact that examples like these have been grouped in the literature on coordination of unlikes, there are significant syntactic differences that justify distinguishing between them representationally and derivationally. We propose two categories of coordination of unlikes: anaphoric and intersective coordinations. In particular, we will focus on how to formulate a structural description that gets the right reference for it in a Republican and proud of it , a point unexplored in existing proposals.