On Odd Coordinations in German

Abstract This paper is concerned with German coordinations which are ‘odd’ in that und ‘and’ superficially does not connect constituents of like categories. The focus is on odd coordinations in which und has a full non-finite verb phrase to its immediate right but only a verb phrase fragment to its immediate left. In the analysis of Heycock and Kroch (1994), such ‘verbal’ odd coordinations arise by asymmetric extraction from a first verb phrases coordinate. It is shown here that this analysis misses a robust empirical generalization: In verbal odd coordinations, the string preceding und must a... Mehr ...