Coordinating Complete Answers: The Case of Tanto-Quanto Conjunction

Abstract

We discuss a coordination strategy found in Portuguese and Italian which we call Tanto-Quanto Conjunction (TQC). The semantic properties that distinguish this construction from run-of-the-milland-conjunction are the focus of this paper.TQC imposes a discourse related requirement on its conjuncts, namely that they each be a complete answer to a question raised in the discourse. We propose ananalysis of TQC where each of its conjuncts falls under the scope of a focus sensitive operator which, by means of an answerhood operator, checks that its prejacent satisfies this requirement.