Exposure is Optional: Learning Unlike Coordination in Language Models
Coordination, a fundamental linguistic structure, remains a subject of intense debate, and its exact nature continues to elude theoretical linguistics. A common view holds that only same-category constituents can be conjoined, which has been challenged by the many grammatical unlike coordinations found in natural language. Treating language models as a computational testbed, we investigate whether the acquisition of unlike coordination requires direct exposure in the training data, or whether it can emerge organically from general compositional abilities. Using Filtered-Corpus Training (FiCT),
