On Unusual Coordination: Category Mismatch

This paper explores two main questions: Why and how do category mismatches occur in coordination, and how can these mismatches be explained within syntactic theory? To address these questions, this paper conducts an in-depth review of counterexamples to the general constraint that typically prohibits the coordination of unlike categories (Bayer 1996). It adopts a modified version of the syntactic dependency approach, which links categories within a structure, as originally proposed by Hernández (2007) and further developed by Reeve (2013a, 2013b, 2014). According to this approach, coordination depends on the presence of a syntactic dependency and the Spec-Head agreement; coordination is possible if these dependencies exist and fails if they do not. The discussion incorporates insights from the works of Brüening and Al Khalaf (2020) and Brüening (2022). Additionally, the paper suggests a potential extension of its proposed analysis to a new examination of distributive coordination constructions (Bošković 2021, 2022).