Coordination

This volume is a study of co-ordination, i.e. structures with conjunctions such as "and", "but", and "or", arguing that these are important words in their constructions, rather than being unimportant and superfluous, because they have many properties in common with categories such as verbs and prepositions. Dr Johannessen has analyzed data from 33 languages, many of them unrelated, and has found striking similarities. She focuses in particular on "unbalanced co-ordination" (UC), that is, co-ordination in which the conjuncts differ with respect to crucial grammatical features such as case and word order. UC occurs in many of the languages in the study, and provides evidence for an analysis of overt, as well as covert, conjunctions as heads in an X-bar theoretical framework. Specifically, there is a strong correlation between the order of conjunctions and abnormal conjuncts and that of heads and complements generally in the languages that have UC. Dr Johannessen also considers extraordinary balanced co-ordination, in which both conjuncts are abnormal. This phenomenon provides additional evidence for conjunctions being heads. She gives a comprehensive account of co-ordination in gener