Prenominal Adverbs, or Apparent Selectional Violations in Coordination Open Access

A robust generalization about coordination is that X and Y may be conjoined in position P if and only if X and Y may each occur alone in P. In particular, different categories may be coordinated in a position that allows either. Apparent violations of this generalization are sometimes taken as evidence for an asymmetric structure of coordination, where one conjunct determines categorial features of the coordinate structure. Bruening and Al Khalaf (2020) and Bruening (2023) argue that one such violation involves coordination of AdvPs and AdjPs in prenominal positions that apparently do not allow AdvPs alone, claiming that The [Once and Future] King is grammatical, while the once king is either ungrammatical or involves a hypothetical compound, once king, that only a minority of English speakers accept. We show that such AdvPs are grammatical as prenominal modifiers, so there is no selectional violation under coordination, and that such AdvPs combine with nouns in regular syntax, rather than via hypothetical compounding. Hence, such constructions do not provide an argument against the symmetric nature of coordination.