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In English coordination, it is very common that a verb should be omitted so that the whole expression sounds natural as exemplifed below.

  • Ann came with, and Bob without, a date. (Langacker 2012).

This omission is very strange for a non-native speaker. What motivates this verb came not to occur again prior to without?

jogloran
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    Note that the noun phrase a date has also been omitted from the first conjunct. More is going on than verb omission in the second conjunct. – jlawler May 05 '22 at 15:13
  • This only sounds strange to a non-native speaker whose own language doesn’t allow this kind of omission of repeated content – and there are lots of other languages apart from English that do (mutatis mutandis). Offhand, I can’t think of any Western European languages that wouldn’t allow similar constructions. (I’m excluding Basque here, ’cause I don’t know nearly enough about it to know either way.) – Janus Bahs Jacquet May 05 '22 at 16:17
  • "For an non-native speaker." As Janus said, plenty of other languages do this. Perhaps it would be more helpful if you list what languages cannot. – cmw May 06 '22 at 03:13

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