This talk points out that if we take seriously the notion of some syntactic categories as corresponding to actual functions from strings to strings, we derive some little known, surprising, but robust effects about coordination. For example, this view (combined with some other independently motivated apparatus) automatically predicts the well-formedness of sentences like “Sarah teaches syntax in the fall, semantics in the spring, goes to music workshops in the summer, and she tends her garden year round” (based on an example first noticed in Maxwell and Manning, 1996). Even more surprisingly, in these sorts of chains the bigger constituents can only be on the right of smaller ones, which fact also follows. Stay tuned for the full paper, currently in progress!