Heycock, Caroline and Zamparelli, Roberto (1999) Toward a unified analysis of DP conjunction. In Dekker, Paul, Eds. Proceedings 12th Amsterdam Colloquium, pages 127-132, Amsterdam.
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In this paper we analyse ``split'' conjunction within DPs, as found in English examples such as (a) and (b). (a) that man and woman (b) those cats and dogs We demonstrate that many of the well-studied Western European languages allow plural split conjunction (b) but not singular (a); in these languages DP-internal singular conjunction can only have the intersective ``joint'' reading possible also in English examples like (c) (c) my friend and colleague We show that the operation of ``set product'' (union over each possible n-tuple across n conjuncts) can be used to define conjunction in a way that derives all the available readings. In order to explain their cross-linguistic distribution we propose a minimal difference between languages in the way they obtain the denotation of a singular noun phrase. Taken together, these ideas yield a syntactic and semantic theory of conjunction which can not only account for the DP data but also explain the distributivity properties of different conjoined categories.