Natural and Accidental Coordination in Persian

The present study investigates the conjunctive nominal coordination in Persian by /o/, to introduce the differences between natural and accidental coordination. As it shows in natural coordination such as ‘mother and father’, ‘husband and wife’ coordinands express semantically closely associated concepts, which are on the same hierarchical level. These coordinands habitually go together and can be said to form some conventionalized whole or “conceptual unit. In accidental coordination, coordination of items is not expected to co-occur or even in a presupposed order. Moreover, we saw the lack of an overt coordinator or an intonation break in natural conjunction. We found out that it is possible to put accidental coordination, natural coordination and compound on a spectrum.