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 always form a grammatical sentence in isolation. It is argued that this generalization can be derived from the Coordinate Structure Constraint, which bans asymmetric extraction. In the spirit of Wilder (1994), it is furthermore argued that grammatical verbal odd coordinations derive from coordinations of larger phrases which are reduced by Gapping. It is shown that this leads to a unified analysis of verbal odd coordinations and analogous ‘nominal’ odd coordinations, in which und appears between a full noun phrase and a noun phrase fragment. Further issues addressed are operator scope and the availability of Left Deletion (Right Node Raising) in odd coordinations.