1170: Coordination Feb 21, 2018

Although children are taught what parts of speech are, they likely identify them intuitively, in the same as a kid would for syllables. There are tests for them, however, that syntacticians can use to prove that a word or phrase actually is one lexical class or another. One such test is called 'coordination', in which one looks at a word or phrase, guessing the part of speech thereof, and than adds another example with "and...", so for example, to determine that 'apples' is a noun phrase in 'I ate apples', one could add another noun phrase, as in 'I ate apples and pears'. This test works, however, because English already allows speakers to not have to repeat obvious elements, or otherwise the previous example-sentence would be the very clunky 'I ate apples and I ate pears', and indeed coordination is quite common in speech anyway. Considering regular speech does show, some phrases cannot be coordinated together, such as with adjuncts and arguments. This can be seen in the ungrammaticality of *"I ate the apple and with a fork", while one can say "I ate with a knife and (with a) fork".

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