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The law and order of selection-violating coordination: German DP-CP-coordination is not sensitive to linear or temporal order

Paper · 2026 · Luise Schwarzer

Summary

In some contexts a clause (CP) can be coordinated with a noun phrase (DP) even though the governing predicate accepts only DPs. An English example is "depend on my assistant and that he will be on time". Two recent accounts explain this through order. The first is a left-to-right derivation in which only the conjunct linearly nearest the selector must meet all selectional demands (Bruening & Al Khalaf 2020; Bruening 2025). The second is a processing account in which the predicate's requirements fade from memory, so a mismatch that comes later goes unnoticed (Kim & Lu 2024). Schwarzer tests both with German, an OV language where coordinated objects can appear before the verb. Both accounts predict that the conjunct nearest the verb should be the selected DP. In two online experiments, including a forced-choice task that compared preverbal and postverbal placement, speakers favoured DP-first order equally in both positions. This contradicts the linear and temporal accounts and is consistent with bottom-up derivations over asymmetric coordination, although it supports them only indirectly. The study also challenges whether the English data generalise across languages.

Key points

  • The paper groups existing analyses into three families:
    • bottom-up/asymmetric approaches, such as Munn 1993, Peterson 2004 and Zhang 2010, plus the null-DP-shell analysis of Sag et al. 1985;
    • linear closeness approaches (Bruening & Al Khalaf; Bruening 2025);
    • temporal closeness, i.e. a grammaticality illusion (Kim & Lu 2024).
  • Experiment 1 checked whether mismatching DP-CP coordination exists in German at all. It used four predicates that, by informal judgments, take DPs but not CPs.
  • Experiment 2 was a forced-choice task in which DP-first beat CP-first 23 to 7 in both preverbal and postverbal contexts.
    • Logistic regression estimated the probability of choosing DP-first at 0.76, with a logit 0.894 higher than that of the first control group (standard error 0.327, z = 2.74).
    • Position had no effect on the choice.
    • Control groups were close to a chance distribution.
  • The author cautions that a general DP-first preference cannot be ruled out. Even so, accepting DP-CP order before the verb remains unexpected under the linear and temporal accounts.
  • Materials, scripts and plots are on OSF (osf.io/kznyt). The survey ran on SoSci Survey.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Using a language whose word order flips the linear predictions while leaving hierarchy unchanged is a clean way to separate "nearest in the string" from "nearest in the tree".
  • I2. Forcing a choice between two orders of the same material, and comparing it against control items with no expected preference, yields a direct preference signal measured against a chance baseline.
  • I3. In the asymmetric view, only the structurally prominent first conjunct must satisfy the predicate's selection, while later conjuncts can slip in a different category.
  • I4. Mixed-category coordination (noun phrase plus that-clause) is a real, systematically constrained pattern rather than noise.
  • I5. Speakers reliably prefer the selected nominal before the unselected clause.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): when evaluating a self-induced repair rule, build minimal pairs where linear and structural proximity diverge, to see which one the rule actually relies on.
  • I2 (learn): compare LLM-teacher or witness-parser preferences between paired variants against neutral control pairs, which serve as negative controls for position bias.
  • I3 (frames): when checking VerbNet selectional restrictions on a coordinated argument, test the first conjunct strictly and allow a clausal later conjunct instead of discarding the whole frame.
  • I4 (tree): let the parser and UD conversion accept a conj link from a nominal object to a clause, rather than forcing a misattachment or relabelling the clause as an independent ccomp.
  • I5 (back): when generating a coordination that mixes a noun phrase and a clause, place the selected noun phrase first to produce the more natural order.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of KonstanzKonstanz · Germany17 works · 232 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 499 worksNeuroscience · 165 worksCognitive Neuroscience · 164 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Legal AI · 134 works

Cite

Cite as Luise Schwarzer. 2026. The law and order of selection-violating coordination: German DP-CP-coordination is not sensitive to linear or temporal order. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.24893

@article{schwarzer2026law,
  title = {{The law and order of selection-violating coordination: German DP-CP-coordination is not sensitive to linear or temporal order}},
  author = {Luise Schwarzer},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.24893},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.24893}
}

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