ABSTRACT
This part of Syntax of Dutch deals with coordination as well as ellipsis phenomena found in coordinate structures. Coordination will be the main topic of Chapter 1. Although coordinate structures resulting from coordination prototypically involve a single COORDINATOR such as en ‘and’ or of ‘or’, it cannot be said that such coordinators select for certain internal or external °arguments. This means that these coordinate structures differ from other syntactic structures in that they are not (extended) °projections of an argument-taking lexical °head. Instead, coordinators typically join two or more similar phrases (which will be referred to as COORDINANDS) into a larger phrase of the same kind. Some illustrations are given in (1) with the coordinator en ‘and’: example (1a) involves the coordination of two main clauses and (1b&c) the coordination of two nominal phrases. Section 1.1 starts by discussing a number of more general properties of coordinate structures and their constituting parts. The discussion in Sections 1.2 to 1.4 provides a detailed discussion of the various types of coordinate structures and their constituting parts, that is, the coordinators and the coordinands.
[CP [CP Jan leest het boek] en [CP Peter leest het artikel]]. Jan reads the book and Peter reads the article ‘Jan is reading the book and Peter is reading the article.’
Jan leest [NP [NP het boek] en [NP het artikel]]. Jan reads the book and the article ‘Jan is reading the book and the article.’
[NP [NP Jan] en [NP Peter]] lezen het boek. Jan and Peter read the book ‘Jan and Peter are reading the book.’
