Man and woman: The last obstacle for boolean coordination

The word and can be used both intersectively and collectively. A major theme in research on coordination has been the quest for a lexical entry that unifies these uses, either based on boolean intersection or based on collective formation. Focusing on English noun- noun coordination, this paper argues for the boolean option. This immediately delivers the intersective behavior of and, as in liar and cheat; as for its collective behavior, as in man and woman, it falls out of the interaction of and with a series of independently motivated type shifters, mainly taken from Winter (2001). Such coordinations are interpreted collectively because the two nouns are interpreted in the same way as the DPs in a man and a woman.