Additives connecting three things?

[Indogermanican]

Hi,

I was going over some SC material and came across 'Additives'. I wondered whether they can be used to connect more than two items. For example

"John and Paula, along with Mike, went to the zoo yesterday."

I guess a sentence beginning with "John, Paula, and Mike" would normally be preferred but are there instances in which this isn't ture? Could this, for example, be used to emphasize that John and Paula are a couple and Mike is just tagging along?

[tim]

this totally works, and in fact this construction is often used in some of the more tricky parallelism problems on the GMAT..