Coordination of unlike grammatical cases (and unlike categories)

Abstract:It is often claimed that conjuncts in coordinate structures must be alike in various ways, in particular, that they should have the same syntactic category and the same grammatical case, if any. This article aims to refute such claims. On the basis of data from Polish, Estonian, and other languages, it demonstrates that there is no universal requirement that conjuncts be alike. Any appearances of such a requirement result from the fact that each conjunct must satisfy all functional constraints on the coordinate structure. The article discusses ways of formalizing such distributive satisfaction of constraints within four major linguistic frameworks: lexical-functional grammar, categorial grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar, and minimalism.