Some notes on coordination in head-final languages

Abstract

In a structuralist tradition going back to at least De Groot (1949:112), and recently revived by Kayne (1994:12), coordinated constituents are taken to be headed by the conjunction, which takes the second coordinand as its complement. This makes it possible to classify conjunctions as initial (A [& B]) or final (A [B &]), and to consider the question whether the use of initial/final conjunctions correlates with headedness (the typological distinction between head-initial and head-final languages). This question is addressed by Stassen (2003: 775), who finds that final conjunctions occur in verb-final languages only. This statement, however, glosses over the fact that final conjunction is rare even in head-final languages. This article presents a survey of the phenomena of noun phrase coordination in head-final languages, from which it will emerge that head-final languages display a remarkable preference for initial conjunctions. If De Groot and Kayne are right about the structure of the coordination constituent, one is forced to conclude that almost all head-final languages show some head-initial structure. The survey presented here is based on a sample of 162 languages constructed for studying morphosyntactic variation (see the Appendix). Head-final languages are defined as those in which the verb (V) and adposition (P)Cor one of the two in case the position of the other is unclearCfollow their complements in the unmarked surface word order. Noun phrase coordination is defined as in (1):