The semantics and pragmatics of conjoined sentences

Abstract

It is widely known that conjoined sentences with and can communicate a wide range of relations between its conjuncts. Therefore, linguists in semantics and pragmatics fields have long tried to examine the nature of those relations and also, put together a plausible approach towards and-utterance interpretation. This paper aims to look at some of the most remarkable accounts that have been given for the variability in the interpretation of conjoined statements. Although totally discarded by current literature, a semantic ambiguity account for the word and is the first thing that comes to one’s mind. However, evidence has been put forward against this approach: (i) the fact that it should give account for a very large range of meanings, (ii) the fact that some juxtaposed counterparts give rise to the same interpretation and (iii) the universality of the many meanings of and in different languages. When it comes to pragmatic approaches, Paul Grice was one of the first authors that theorised about conjoined sentences in the light of pragmatics. Within a Gricean framework, the sequential interpretation of some conjoined sentences is the result of an implicature arising from Grice’s Maxim of orderliness. Many authors have argued that this approach may be unable to account for the whole issue, and evidence suggests that this theory is not consistent in some cases. Within Relevance Theory, the interpretation of conjoined sentences is regarded as an enrichment of the explicitly communicated level of an utterance, and it is governed by the principle of relevance which is rooted in the cognitive processing of a set of essential assumptions. This last theory is able to cover a wide range of conjoined sentence interpretation including narrative and some non- narrative sentences. However, there is a set of non-narrative cases that seem to be problematic for any account in which the word and is taken to equal its respective logical operator & (such as the Gricean and Relevamce Theory), at first sight, because they do not give rise to the same interpretation as their juxtaposed counterparts. In this regard, Blakemore and Carston have tried to account for these cases within the relevance theoretic framework, but Kitis and Txurruka have also done their bit and put forward very interesting remarks that could work with a relevance theoretical account. I conclude by saying that and-utterance interpretation seems to be a matter of context- sensitive cognition, hence Relevance Theory is the most complete account to date; and that future research lines could put the focus on the nature of the word and, which has long been considered to have the same semantics as its respective logical operator since Grice.