Coordination

Dr Johannessen focuses on coordination, i.e. structures with conjunctions such as and, but, and or. These are important words in their constructions, rather than being unimportant and superfluous, because they have many properties in common with categories like verbs and prepositions. She has analysed thirty-three languages and has found many striking similarities. This is the first time the coordination has been studied systematically from a cross-linguistic perspective. Her theory of syntactic coordination aims to be general and universal, and is broadly compatible with Chomsky's minimalist framework.