Coordination

Coordination is the linking of two syntactic elements that play the same semantic role.

• "The term coordination refers to syntactic constructions in which two or more units of the same type are combined into a larger unit and still have the same semantic relations with other surrounding elements." (Haspelmath 2007:1)

Subtypes

• conjunction (= conjunctive coordination) ('X and Y')
• disjunction (= disjunctive coordination) ('X or Y')
• adversative coordination ('X but Y')

Origin

The term coordination seems to have been coined only in the 19th century. In the earlier literature, the term copulative was often used for coordination.

References

• Haspelmath, Martin. 2007. Coordination. In: Shopen, Timothy (ed.) Language typology and syntactic description, vol. II. Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 1-51.

Other languages

German Koordination