Coordination: A view from syntactic theory and second language acquisition

This thesis aims to fill the gaps in two distinct, but related, areas of linguistic theory with respect to coordination. From the perspective of syntactic theory, I argue that all previous approaches to the syntactic structure of coordination fail to describe the universal properties of such constructions. To remedy this, I propose a new structure that will be demonstrated to be capable of deriving all of the universal properties of coordination. From the perspective of second language acquisition, the results of an experimental study investigating the coordinate structure prosody used by native English-speakers when speaking Japanese will show that L2 Japanese speakers learn a crucial difference between Japanese and English coordinate structures earlier than initially expected and without explicit instruction, revealing that although L2 learners transfer certain prosodic structures from their native language to their second language at first, they use the L2 prosody exclusively after their first year of study. Finally, I discuss the implications of both aspects of the thesis for syntactic theory and second language acquisition.