UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 11 (1999)

The pragmatics of and conjunctions:
The non-narrative cases

DIANE BLAKEMORE & ROBYN CARSTON

Utterances of and-conjunctions can communicate a wide range of relationships between the states of affairs described by their conjuncts. They share these possibilities with their juxtaposed counterparts, but there are also some quite strong constraints on their interpretation which do not arise for the juxtaposed cases. Focussing in particular on a range of little discussed cases in which temporal sequencing is not at issue, we attempt a relevance-theoretic pragmatic account of the interpretations that do arise, and an explanation of the non-occurrence of the others.

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