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The term coordination refers to the juxtaposition of two or more conjuncts often linked by a conjunction such as and or or. The conjuncts (e.g., our friend and your teacher in Our friend and your teacher sent greetings) may be words or phrases of any type. They are a defining property of coordination, while the presence or absence of a conjunction depends on the specifics of the particular language. As a general phenomenon, coordination differs from subordination in that the conjuncts are typically symmetric in many ways: they often belong to like syntactic categories, and if nominal, each carries the same case. Additionally, if there is extraction, this must typically be out of all conjuncts in parallel, a phenomenon known as Across-the-Board extraction. Extraction of a single conjunct, or out of a single conjunct, is prohibited by the Coordinate Structure Constraint. Despite this overall symmetry, coordination does sometimes behave in an asymmetric fashion. Under certain circumstances, the conjuncts may be of unlike categories or extraction may occur out of one conjunct, but not another, thus yielding apparent violations of the Coordinate Structure Constraint. In addition, case and agreement show a wide range of complex and sometimes asymmetric behavior cross-linguistically. This tension between the symmetric and asymmetric properties of coordination is one of the reasons that coordination has remained an interesting analytical puzzle for many decades. Within the general area of coordination, a number of specific sentence types have generated much interest. One is Gapping, in which two sentences are conjoined, but material (often the verb) is missing from the middle of the second conjunct, as in Mary ate beans and John _ potatoes. Another is Right Node Raising, in which shared material from the right edge of sentential conjuncts is placed in the right periphery of the entire sentence, as in The chefs prepared __ and the customers ate __ [a very elaborately constructed dessert]. Finally, some languages have a phenomenon known as comitative coordination, in which a verb has two arguments, one morphologically plural and the other comitative (e.g., with the preposition with), but the plural argument may be understood as singular. English does not have this phenomenon, but if it did, a sentence like We went to the movies with John could be understood as John and I went to the movies.

One of the most fundamental problems in research on spoken language is to understand how the categorical, systemic knowledge that speakers have in the form of a phonological grammar maps onto the continuous, high-dimensional physical speech act that transmits the linguistic message. The invariant units of phonological analysis have no invariant analogue in the signal—any given phoneme can manifest itself in many possible variants, depending on context, speech rate, utterance position and the like, and the acoustic cues for a given phoneme are spread out over time across multiple linguistic units. Speakers and listeners are highly knowledgeable about the lawfully structured variation in the signal and they skillfully exploit articulatory and acoustic trading relations when speaking and perceiving. For the scientific description of spoken language understanding this association between abstract, discrete categories and continuous speech dynamics remains a formidable challenge. Articulatory Phonology and the associated Task Dynamic model present one particular proposal on how to step up to this challenge using the mathematics of dynamical systems with the central insight being that spoken language is fundamentally based on the production and perception of linguistically defined patterns of motion. In Articulatory Phonology, primitive units of phonological representation are called gestures. Gestures are defined based on linear second order differential equations, giving them inherent spatial and temporal specifications. Gestures control the vocal tract at a macroscopic level, harnessing the many degrees of freedom in the vocal tract into low-dimensional control units. Phonology, in this model, thus directly governs the spatial and temporal orchestration of vocal tract actions.

Natural language allows questioning into embedded clauses. One strategy for doing so involves structures like the following: [CP-1 whi [TP DP V [CP-2 … ti …]]], where a wh-phrase that thematically belongs to the embedded clause appears in the matrix scope position. A possible answer to such a question must specify values for the fronted wh-phrase. This is the extraction strategy seen in languages like English. An alternative strategy involves a structure in which there is a distinct wh-phrase in the matrix clause. It is manifested in two types of structures. One is a close analog of extraction, but for the extra wh-phrase: [CP-1 whi [TP DP V [CP-2 whj [TP…t­j­…]]]]. The other simply juxtaposes two questions, rather than syntactically subordinating the second one: [CP-3 [CP-1 whi [TP…]] [CP-2 whj [TP…]]]. In both versions of the second strategy, the wh-phrase in CP-1 is invariant, typically corresponding to the wh-phrase used to question propositional arguments. There is no restriction on the type or number of wh-phrases in CP-2. Possible answers must specify values for all the wh-phrases in CP-2. This strategy is variously known as scope marking, partial wh movement or expletive wh questions. Both strategies can occur in the same language. German, for example, instantiates all three possibilities: extraction, subordinated, as well as sequential scope marking. The scope marking strategy is also manifested in in-situ languages. Scope marking has been subjected to 30 years of research and much is known at this time about its syntactic and semantic properties. Its pragmatics properties, however, are relatively under-studied. The acquisition of scope marking, in relation to extraction, is another area of ongoing research. One of the reasons why scope marking has intrigued linguists is because it seems to defy central tenets about the nature of wh scope taking. For example, it presents an apparent mismatch between the number of wh expressions in the question and the number of expressions whose values are specified in the answer. It poses a challenge for our understanding of how syntactic structure feeds semantic interpretation and how alternative strategies with similar functions relate to each other.