Coordinate structures in English

Comparable samples of speech and writing in the British and American components of the International Corpus of English were examined to study certain formal and functional properties of coordinate structures in English. This analysis indicated that and is a primary coordinator in English, and that but and or are more peripheral; that the concept of coordination without a coordinator (so‐called asyndetic coordination) should be made more precise by requiring that some other signal of coordination be present (e.g. ellipsis found only in coordinate structures); and that because coordinate structures in speech violate certain grammatical constraints on coordination, coordination is best viewed as a grammatical category whose constraints are sometimes violated in speech for purely pragmatic (i.e. communicative) reasons.