Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. There are several reasons for writing a book on the syntax of coordination. The most important of these reasons is that because coordination is a syntactic construction that probably occurs in all languages, it is an area of considerable interest to linguists. The second is that it has been a fruitful area of research, and also a controversial one In Chomsky (1957), coordination is used as a test for constituenthood, and as an argument against Phrase Structure Grammar and in favour of Transformational Grammar. It has also been used as an argument in favour of Phrase Structure Grammar, and against Transformational Grammar, for instance in Gazdar. The fourth reason is that the discussion about coordination so far has made use of a remarkably limited range of data: usually only English declarative sentences are discussed.