Bob's pronominalization argument is one I used 39 years ago in my MA syntax exam at UCLA.  Basically the principle is that the referent, Mary, must command the pronoun, she.  Command has a formal definition, but for our purposes here it means that the referent must be in a clause that the clause containing the pronoun is subordinate to.  However, the point I was making then was that it's not a purely syntactic argument but a pragmatic one as well.  While the clause containing the conjunction can't come first, so that his sentence would be bad for that reason alone, cataphoric reference, or reverse pronominalization does work in coordinate structures.  We can say, for example,

He wanted to please her, for Mary was the girl of his dreams.

as long as the for-clause is presupposed to be true.  "Mary" will be unstressed because it's not new information.  The first clause will also end with what's often called comma-intonation, a slight rise in pitch after the pitch fall on "her".  We tend not to write sentences like this because we have no way to mark stress and intonation.  This cataphora also works with "and".  To use a sentence from a post or two back,

He ate five green apples, and Sammy got a belly ache.

The same stress and intonation conditions hold.  Some speakers seem not to be accept cataphora in coordinate clauses.  I remember raising the point some time back, and Johanna Rubba responded that the sentences didn't work for her at all.

Herb 

Subject: Re: Coordinating Conjunctions
 
Just an observation about the concept of coordinating and subordinating conjunctions.

I think these categories are based on syntactic properties and not semantic properties.  
Traditional grammar seems to get it right.  Craig noted:

  You can make a case that "He wanted to please her, for she was the girl
of his dreams" is very close to "He wanted to please her because she
was the girl of his dreams." I would like to call both subordinate, but
traditional grammar (and the punctuation conventions that come with it)
recognize the "for" as coordinating. "For she was the girl of his
dreams" would not be a fragment in traditional grammar, but "because
she was the girl of his dreams" would.

A subordinate clause is within a main clause.  This allows an interesting property.  In the following two sentences, she can refer to Mary.  

1) He wanted to please Mary because she was the girl of her dreams.
2) Because she was the girl of her dreams, he wanted to please Mary.

On the other hand, this is not possible with "for" in the equivalent sentence for (2).

3) *For she was the girl of her dreams, he wanted to please Mary.

This is not to say the language changes.  I think "though" is becoming an adverbial conjunction for many.

Bob Yates
University of Central Missouri

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/