Abstract
The behavior of coordination, the operation which links together linguistic material by means of “and” and “or”, is different from that of any other linguistic operation, and can only be understood in terms of the combination of syntactic and semantic processes. The article presents the key features of this phenomenon, from old syntactic puzzles (the parallelism requirement, the Coordinate Structure Constraint, the ellipsis patterns), to semantic facts such as the difference between Boolean and non-Boolean conjunction, the cumulativity/distributivity pattern, the possibility of “nested” pluralities and the scopal behavior of “and” and “or”. The article reviews the main theories that have been put forth to explain these facts, with an eye on their interrelations and on the way syntax and semantics can sometimes compete for a solution.
