On the representation of coordination

For several decades, linguists (e.g., Dougherty 1970, Neijt 1979) have assumed that coordination could be described by X X (conj X)* or a variant of this phrase structure rule, where the Kleene star expresses that there is no limit to the number of recursions. Actually, two kinds of recursion obtain, namely, by the Kleene star and by embedding, as will be exemplified below. In the following the rule above is referred to as the Kleene rule. A coordinate structure was regarded as a number of occurrences of X alternating with coordinating conjunctions like and and or. According to this rule, the categorial status of the whole structure is identical to the categorial status of the conjoined parts. Another facet of this proposal is the unlimited number of daughters, since the right-hand side collapses the expansions