Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2026
It is often claimed that conjuncts in coordinate structures must be alike in various ways, in particular, that they should have the same syntactic category and the same grammatical case, if any. This article aims to refute such claims. On the basis of data from Polish, Estonian, and other languages, it demonstrates that there is no universal requirement that conjuncts be alike. Any appearances of such a requirement result from the fact that each conjunct must satisfy all functional constraints on the coordinate structure. The article discusses ways of formalizing such distributive satisfaction of constraints within four major linguistic frameworks: lexical-functional grammar, categorial grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar, and minimalism.
I am grateful for comments on various versions of this article that I received from Bob Borsley, Rui Chaves, Mary Dalrymple, Ad Neeleman, Agnieszka Patejuk, Shûichi Yatabe, and three anonymous referees, as well as Susi Wurmbrand and John Beavers, the Language editors who dealt with this paper. Special thanks go to Agnieszka Patejuk; this article would not be possible without our earlier work on the coordination of unlikes (Patejuk & Przepiórkowski 2012, 2014, 2019, 2021, Przepiórkowski & Patejuk 2012, 2021). The usual disclaimers apply. This paper was written and substantially revised when I was a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford (Wolfson College and the Centre for Linguistics & Philology), and I would like to thank Mary Dalrymple and everybody else at Oxford for their hospitality.