Coordination of parts of words

Coordination of parts of words, as in ortho and periodontists, has to be interpreted at the level of the word parts because the above NP can felicitously describe a pair of one orthodontist and one periodontist. This paper develops a theory of denotations for arbitrary word parts, in which the coordinate word parts denote their own sound, and the rest of the word is a function from sounds to word meanings. This yields the correct interpretation for number in coordinate constructions. The paper also explores phonological constraints on coordinate structures, and shows how certain ungrammatical structures that can be interpreted by the semantics are ruled out on phonological grounds.