Interpreting conjunctions

Bott, Lewis ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4926-1231, Frisson, Steven and Murphy, Gregory L. 2009. Interpreting conjunctions. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 62 (4) , pp. 681-706. 10.1080/17470210802214866

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Abstract

The interpretation generated from a sentence of the form P and Q can often be different to that generated by Q and P, despite the fact that and has a symmetric truth-conditional meaning. We experimentally investigated to what extent this difference in meaning is due to the connective and and to what extent it is due to order of mention of the events in the sentence. In three experiments, we collected interpretations of sentences in which we varied the presence of the conjunction, the order of mention of the events, and the type of relation holding between the events (temporally vs. causally related events). The results indicated that the effect of using a conjunction was dependent on the discourse relation between the events. Our findings contradict a narrative marker theory of and, but provide partial support for a single-unit theory derived from Carston (2002). The results are discussed in terms of conjunction processing and implicatures of temporal order.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Uncontrolled Keywords:	pragmatics ; discourse ; implicature ; inference
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
ISSN:	1747-0218
Last Modified:	18 Oct 2022 12:53
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/11504

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