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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