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Co-analysis

MORPHOLOGY/SYNTAX: a concept proposed by Williams (1979) and DiSciullo & Williams (1987) to account for a situation where one grammatical function (e.g. possessive) is expressed syntactically as well as morphologically, i.e. by adding a grammatical element both to a phrase as a whole and to the head of that phrase. Co-analysis means that a syntactic and a morphological representation are assigned to one phrase. The English possessive marker 's sometimes appears to be attached to a possessor phrase as a whole (cf. (i)), and in other cases it seems to be attached to a noun (cf. (ii)):

(i)  [the man on the corner]'s hat
(ii) his hat (= [he]'s hat)
Phrases such as the one in (iii) are ambiguous, since the possessive is either attached to the NP the man or to the N man. To account for this ambiguity, Williams & DiSciullo assign a co-analyzed structure to the NP the man's, cf. (iv):
(iii) the man's hat (= [the man]'s hat or the [man]'s hat)

(iv)			NP
		       /  \						     NP    \
		    /  \    \			
	         the   man   's	 hat
		  \	|    /			
		   \    N   /
		    \	 \ /	
		     \	  N
		      \	 /
		       NP

LIT. Di Sciullo, A. M. and E. Williams (1987)
Williams, E. (1979)