A syntactic account of Romanian correlative coordination from a Romance perspective

Abstract

This paper examines the syntactic behaviour of two omnisyndetic coordinations (also called correlative coordinations), i.e. the disjunctive and the conjunctive types in Romanian, by explaining its data in a Romance perspective. Major issue has been whether these structures have symmetric or asymmetric structures. If all these Romance languages share a symmetric analysis for the disjunctive type Conj ... Conj, it is not the case for the conjunctive type. Our aim is to show that the postulation of a conjunctional status for the Romanian structure şi ... şi ('both ... and'), which is the most widespread view in Romanian grammars, is inadequate for the Romanian data.