The author discusses the problem of reference of (nominal, verbal, adjectival groups, and adverbial) sentence components realized within coordinate relationships. Initially, the author refers to the theory of compactness as an explanation of the processes of generating coordinate constructions in the structure of simple sentences. There are evidences in favor of the thesis that the compactness theory does not explain coordination in semantic aspect. This applies not only to the structure with the main predicate with plural distribution (valence), but also to the entire range of coordination. The author distinguishes two types of references of coordinated phrases (in structure of a simple sentence): a distributional and a collective one. The constructional and semantic peculiarities of the expressions of both types have been described in relation to the contemporary Polish and Russian language.