From discourse to ‘‘odd coordinations’’: On asymmetric coordination and subject gaps in German

SLF-Coordination (SLFC) and Asymmetric Coordination (AC) in the sense of Höhle (1983, 1990) exhibit specific semantic (a ‘fusing ’ interpretation) and syntactic properties (e.g., verb fronting in non-initial conjuncts). This paper ties together these characteristics by considering them an immediate consequence of the fact that in AC and SLFC properties typically attributed to ‘coordinate’ structures in discourse show up in ‘grammaticalized ’ form. As far as the analysis of SLFC is concerned, it is furthermore argued that the dropping of the the subject (and only the subject) is in a sense parasitic on the special fusing semantics of the construction. That dropping the subject systematically results in an overt V1-structure is traced back to the way covert operators are licensed and identified in specifier positions in German (paralleling Topic Drop)