Inside out: A note on the hierarchical update of nominal modifiers

Some sentences are globally informative but still deviant because they contain an expression that is redundant relative in its local environment, as in: #Ann is staying in Paris and she in France. In this case, the second conjunct seems to be evaluated after the first. In several frameworks, order of evaluation follows from linear order. Focusing on nominal modification in Japanese and Korean, Ingason (2016) argued that the correct notion of order is hierarchical, not linear, and he proposed that structurally higher elements are evaluated before lower elements, a conclusion that might dovetail with Romoli and Mandelkern's (2017) proposal for postposed if-clauses in conditionals. While agreeing with Ingason's conclusion that for nominal modification evaluation order is hierarchical, we amend his theory by considering sentences with several pre- or postnominal modifiers (in English, Mandarin and French). We argue that a Noun Phrase is evaluated `inside out', starting with the head noun and adding modifiers by order of structural proximity to the head - with the result that higher modifiers are evaluated later than lower modifiers (against the `higher is earlier' view). We explore in an Appendix how this finding can be integrated with existing accounts of evaluation order for other constituent types, such as conjunction.