It has occurred to me that people who are prepared to accept the legend from a Garfield cartoon as respectable printed prose (which is plausible enough) might send me Sunday's Garfield strip, which had the eponymous feline glutton saying (over several panels):
I'm so hungry I could eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and eat... But why stop there?
That might appear to be 15 coordinates, a super example to submit in response to my earlier musings.
Unfortunately, this doesn't count. It isn't true coordination. This is coordinative reduplication. The meaning is intensificatory: notice that I could eat and I could eat is just a redundant way to say I could eat, but I could eat and eat means more than that, it means something like "I could eat a whole lot." So I can't count that one.
Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at March 30, 2004 06:33 PM