Some Problems of Coordination in German

Abstract

oordination is one of the most difficult areas of natural language and so far there is no comprehensive treatment for constituent coordination, gapping, left deletion, right node raising, etc., neither in GB nor in LFG or GPSG. The author begins with a rather irregular case of coordination which he illustrates with the following example: `In den Wald ging der Jager und fing eine Hasen' (`Into the forest went the hunter and caught a hare'). The first conjunct is a complete sentence, the second conjunct must be analyzed as a verb phrase because the subject is missing. Starting with this missing subject he investigates the general conditions of ellipsis in coordinate structures. He tries to find out by empirical generalizations from the grammatical and ungrammatical coordinate constructions what restrictions have to be observed. He summarizes the restrictions he found out in six points. The restrictions are illustrated with relevant grammatical and ungrammatical examples