This article deals with the relations between coordination and word order in the history of Swedish. In Present‐day Swedish, the finite verb always raises to Co in main‐clause coordination, whereas it always remains in situ (in VP) in subordinate clause coordination. In Older Swedish, either verbal position was possible in both cases. In addition, VS word order was used in contexts where it would be ungrammatical today. Subordinate conjuncts with V in Co, main clause conjuncts with V in Vo, and VS conjuncts are all analysed as parts of coordination, in which only the first conjunct contains a trace after an extracted element; this type of trace asymmetry characterises a wide range of coordinate structures in Older Swedish. In the modern language, on the other hand, a trace in a first conjunct is always matched with equivalent traces in all subsequent conjuncts (the traces occur across the board).

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This special issue of Nordic Journal of Linguistics is dedicated to diachronic generative syntax in the North Germanic languages. With the introduction of generative grammar in the late 1950s the historical perspective became less prominent within linguistics. Instead, contemporary language, normally represented by the researcher’s own intuitions, became the unmarked empirical basis within the generative field, although there were some early pioneering studies in generative historical syntax (e.g. Traugott 1972). It was not until the introduction of the Principles and Parameters theory in the 1990s that diachronic syntax emerged as an important domain of inquiry for generative linguists. Since then, the study of syntactic change has added a temporal dimension to the overall enterprise to better understand the nature of variation in human language.