Based on a temporally and spatially balanced corpus of prose texts from the 14th to 17th centuries, this work empirically examines the assumption that in Early New High German (1350-1650), coordination structures and coordination ellipses are more asymmetrical (non-parallel) in nature than in Modern German. 

The corpus study pursues two lines of inquiry: First, it develops a typology of syntactic options that reveal and connect sentence conjunctions in Early New High German. The syntactic options available in Early New High German in coordination structures are thus systematically recorded, enabling a comparison with Modern German sentence coordination. Second, it gains a deeper understanding of those coordination structures that are only marginally used in Modern German or have even disappeared. These are two phenomena: 
(1) declarative sentence conjuncts with V1 word order, and 
(2) non-parallel coordination ellipses.