In the present paper two pairs of terms and notions are discussed as for their benefit to syntactic studies. The notions of coordination and subordination with their counterparts the parataxis and hypotaxis are studied in relation to the domain of the linguistic meaning and to the domain of language form, respectively. The asymmetry between them is studied on selected data of Czech. Czech constructions classified in Czech syntactic handbooks as hypotactical forms of coordination are analyzed. In the syntactic structure of Otec s matkou odjeli do lázní [Father with mother went to the spa] the possible plural agreement of the predicate demonstrates a hypotactical patterning of the coordination between father and mother. The “false” subordinated clauses are presented as the other example of the hypotactic coordination. On the other side, the nominal constructions introduced by the expressions místo [instead of], and the ambiguous expression kromě [beside/with exception] are excluded from the domain of asymmetry and the proposal to classify them as specific types of adverbials (a substitution, an addition, and an exception) is formulated.
It is only the aid of large corpora (several billions of words) that enables us to discover some intuitively and spontaneously followed rules of grammar. Different kinds of ellipsis and non-ellipsis (repetition of a word or a nominal phrase, which - under some conditions - can be omitted) can also be governed by such rules. The corpus findings of sentence structures as (1) Zastavila se a podívala se na hodinky or (2) Zastavila se a podívala na hodinky (She stopped and looked at her watch) have clearly shown that ellipsis as well as repetition is a (strict) rule under specific semantic and syntactic conditions.