Coordinator

A coordinator is a particle or affix that serves to link the coordinands in coordination.

• "The particle or affix that serves to link the units of a coordinate construction is called coordinator." (Haspelmath 2007:1)

Examples

In English, the most important coordinators are and, or, and but.

Subtypes

• conjunctive coordinator (e.g. and)
• disjunctive coordinator (e.g. or)
• adversative coordinator (e.g. but)

Synonym

• coordinating conjunction (this term was the most comomn term in the second half of the 19th century, and was still widely used in the 20th).

Origin

The term became current only in the 20th century. Probably Bloomfield's (1933:195) use of the term was very influential in spreading it.

• "The phrase boys and girls belongs to the same form-class as the constituents, boys, girls; these constituents are the members of the co-ordination, and the other constituent is the co-ordinator." (Bloomfield 1933:195)

Reference

• Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Henry Holt and Co.
• Haspelmath, Martin. 2007. Coordination. In: Shopen, Timothy (ed.) Language typology and syntactic description, vol. II. Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 1-51.

Other languages

German Koordinator