In linguistics, the term right node raising (RNR) denotes a sharing mechanism that sees the material to the immediate right of parallel structures being in some sense "shared" by those parallel structures, e.g. [Sam likes] but [Fred dislikes] the debates.
While the term right node raising survives, the actual analysis that Postal proposed is not (or no longer) widely accepted.
This special intonation contour is sometimes indicated using commas, e.g. Fred prepares, and Susan eats, the food.
Word combinations such as Fred prepares and Susan eats do not qualify as constituents in most theories of syntax.
This fact casts doubt on the usefulness of coordination as a test for identifying the constituent structure of sentences.
The following subsections enumerate some noteworthy traits of RNR: 1) RNR is independent of coordination; 2) it occurs at various levels of structure (not just at the clausal level); 3) it is unlike instances of forward sharing in crucial respects; 4) the shared material can fail to qualify as a constituent; and 5) it at times requires the conjunct-final elements to stand in contrast to each other.
This fact is evident in the examples throughout this article, where the bracketed strings are shown as what most theories of syntax take to be non-constituents.
The large conjunct approach in terms of movement assumes that the parallel structures of RNR are full clauses or phrases below the surface.
A movement mechanism is responsible for raising the shared material out of both conjuncts to a position in the hierarchy that is above the level of the parallel structures.
Thus by assuming movement, the account of RNR can maintain a theory of syntax that is constituent-based, i.e. the constituent is the fundamental unit of syntactic analysis.
[14] The large conjunct approach in terms of ellipsis also assumes that the parallel structures of RNR are full clauses or phrases below the surface.
At times the pre-ellipsis structure would be nonsensical and/or simply ungrammatical, e.g.[16] If the indicated ellipses were not to occur in these cases, the sentences would be bad.
[17] Instead, it assumes that what you see is what you get; the parallel structures are non-constituent strings that share the material to the immediate right of the final bracket.
The challenge facing the small conjunct approach is therefore to provide a principled account of how the RNR mechanism allows the parallel structures to be non-constituents.