Abstract

The paper presents a dependency grammar theory of non-gapping coordination. The approach draws a distinction between standard cases of coordination – called String Coordination – and gapping. Only small conjuncts are acknowledged. The core of the approach is expressed in terms of three constraints – the Contiguity Requirement (CR), the Parallelism Requirement (PR), and the Restriction on Shared Constituents (RSC) – that restrict which strings may be coordinated and in terms of the material that conjuncts may share. The claims made are valid for both English and German.