The parallelisms of coordination

The aim of this paper is to analyze whether and under what conditions clausal coordination may be characterized in terms of some internal parallelism. It will first of all be shown that every coordination relation is characterized by an inherent functional parallelism, based on the conceptual and pragmatic symmetry of the linked states of affairs. Secondly, the semantic level will be taken into account and the main semantic types of coordination relation will be examined along the two dimensions of cooccurrence vs. non-cooccurrence. Finally, the syntactic parallelism of the attested coordinating constructions will be analyzed, and it will be shown that the variation attested in the cross-linguistic coding of specific subtypes of combination, contrast and alternative is motivated by the different semantic properties that characterize the relations expressed. In particular, based on the syntactic parallelism of the attested constructions, it will be argued that certain semantic types of coordination relations can be argued to be ‘more parallel’ than others.