COORDINATION AND NON-COMPLEX STRUCTURES

The paper focuses on a debatable issue of whether coordinated structures can appear at levels lower than that of a sentence. Despite the not-so-rare opinion that each instance of use of a conjunction presupposes a complex structure, i.e., a coordinated complex sentence, we support the stance that conjunctions, and therefore coordination, can occur at the level of phrases and the level of the simple, i.e., non-complex, sentence. It can occur both in noun phrases, e.g., in various names, titles and similar, such as Bosna i Hercegovina (‘Bosnia and Herzegovina’), strah i trepet (‘fear and trembling’), rat i mir (‘war and peace’), Ciganin ali najljepši (‘Gypsy, but the fairest of them all’), sve ili ništa (‘all or nothing’) and similar. Coordination is particularly common at the level of the simple (expanded) sentence. Various syntactic elements can be coordinated: subjects, e.g., Ivan i Marko dolaze (‘Ivan and Marko are coming’), predicates, e.g., Marko sjedi i piše (‘Marko is sitting and writing’), objects, e.g., Piše priče i romane (‘He writes short stories and novels’), adverbials, e.g., Radi noću i danju (‘He works nights and days’), Posluje pošteno ili nikako (‘He conducts business in an honest fashion or not at all’), and attributes, e.g., Uporan i marljiv čovjek prije ili kasnije uspjeva (‘A persistent and hard-working man sooner or later succeeds’), etc. We claim that in all the aforementioned and similar cases we are talking about simple sentences regardless of whether we interpret them with the assumption that the syntactic elements are coordinated or as a consequence of different types of economizations of complex structures. We will also analyse occurrences of coordination that are typical only of non-complex structures. For example, correlatives bilo...bilo (either…or) and što…što (both…and) can only link syntactic elements, i.e., they cannot link (complete) clauses in complex (disjunctive) sentences, compare Stalno ima problema bilo poslovnih bilo privatnih (‘He is constantly having problems, either business or private’) with *Bilo ima poslovnih bilo ima privatnih problema (‘Either he is having business, or he is having private problems’) or Pročitali su veći broj romana, što starijih što novijih. (‘They have read a great number of novels, both older and more recent.’).