This section provides more detailed information about the syntactic behavior, interpretation and use of individual coordinators. We will focus on the coordinators listed in (259), all of which are common in colloquial speech. The more formal coordinators mentioned in Section 38.1, sub III, will be discussed only insofar as they shed light on issues that the coordinators in (259) cannot handle. Section 38.4.1 begins with a discussion of the simple coordinators; the correlative forms will follow in Section 38.4.2.

We will focus on three recurring issues. The first is whether the coordinator imposes categorial or semantic restrictions on its coordinands. While the coordinators enand and ofor seem to be quite unrestricted in this respect, coordinators like maarbut, wantbecause and dusso seem to be restricted to propositional and predicative phrases. This difference is illustrated in (260) for maarbut by showing that it can be used to link clauses (propositions) but not to link referential noun phrases (entities).

The second issue concerns subject-verb agreement triggered by coordinate structures functioning as subjects. We will describe these with the help of resolution rules of the type in (261); cf. Corbett (2000: §6).

These rules ensure that the conjunctive nominal coordinate structure in (262a) triggers plural agreement on the finite verb, while the disjunctive nominal coordinate structure in (262b) triggers singular agreement.

In some cases, however, there seem to be no generally accepted resolution rules. This is illustrated by the fact that example (263a) is highly marked regardless of the form of the finite verb: both the third person form komtcomes selected by the proper noun Jan and the first person form komcome selected by the referential pronoun ikI yield a degraded result.

The third issue is the meaning contribution of the coordinator, in particular whether it can be exhaustively described in terms of conjunction and disjunction (as in formal logic). A helpful distinction here is between symmetric and asymmetric coordination: since conjunction and disjunction exhibit the property of commutativity discussed in Section 38.3, sub IIIA, we expect coordinators with a purely semantic truth-conditional meaning to exhibit the same property, while coordinators with additional pragmatic truth-conditional meaning aspects may lack this property. This leads to the distinction in (264).

The notion of (a)symmetry refers to the fact that the coordinands can(not) swap places without affecting the truth conditions of the sentence in the broader (pragmatic) sense of the “specification of what the world would be like if the sentence were true”; cf. Birner (2013:16). This distinction, which is often discussed in relation to the coordinator enand in particular, is illustrated in (265). The coordinate structures in the (a)-examples are symmetric in the sense that changing the order of the coordinands does not affect the truth conditions. The (b)-examples, on the other hand, are asymmetric in the sense that they express different relations between the two coordinands: example (265b) gives the death of the female person in question as the reason for her burial, while (265b') gives her burial as the cause of her death, resulting in quite different truth conditions; cf. Dik (1968:57) and Van Oirsouw (1987:13), among many others. Other special readings of the coordinators will also be discussed.