Syntax | Semantics | Unsignalled Information | Logic | The Myths of the Logicians

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Introduction

Of all the languages in all the towns in all the world, and she walks into mine!

I think English AND is a wonderful concept. And English 'and' is a wonderful word. Utterly uninhibited in choice of syntactic partners; utterly faithful to a single, simple pattern in semantics; and withal the flexibility to provide a vast range of subtle nuances and dramatic effects. And all this in one short word! Quite magical.

And so very deeply human, too. The human mind has just two fundamental dynamic modes of operation, modes which underlie, inform, and make possible all our mental accomplishments and achievements. We can split, and we can integrate. Every mental act, state or event is a function of those two modes. And AND locks directly into one of them: AND is all about integration.

Our AND-integrations, as you will see, are richly complex and polymorphously diverse. And as a consequence, to understand 'and' fully requires bringing to bear on each sentence containing it the whole wealth of our experience.

Before you proceed, why not have a look at some of the things that 'and' can do?

Welcome back. Quite a variety, isn't there? And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There is a lot to explain here.

Let us investigate. As always, we begin with the Grammar. And the first part of any such Grammatical investigation is always the search for syntactical pattern:

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Syntax

'And' is one of the English coordinating conjunctions. It stands between lexical items (its coordinands) from a given phrase-class, and thereby coordinates them, as we say, creating a more complex lexical item of the same class. And it is utterly uninhibited in coordination. It just doesn't mind what class of word it hangs around with. It can coordinate

NOUNS:     'men and women'     'cheese and pickle'    'health and safety'     'brains and beauty' .....

PRONOUNS:    'you and me'    'him and her'    'us and them' .....

DETERMINERS:    'this and that'    'each and every'    'one and only' .....

VERBS:    'laughed and cried'    'aimed and fired'    'shot and killed'    'ate and ate' .....

ADVERBS:     'slowly and surely'     'loudly and softly'    'fast and furiously' ....

ADJECTIVES:     'black and blue'     'tall and thin'    'old and tired' .....

PREPOSITIONS:    'up and down'    'in and out'    'to and fro'    'over and under'     'on and on' .....

And very occasionally, it coordinates

SENTENCES:     'I live in Oxford and my sister lives in York'   'Peter lost his reputation and he lost his job'

Given this even-handed variety, two things are for sure.

First: in order to thus naturally and easily cope with all these different kinds of words, with all their different kinds of meanings, 'and' must have a very simple meaning.

Second: only a fool, surely, would try to elucidate this variety by insisting on just one set of coordinands (say, sentences) as somehow deploying the proper, basic meaning of 'and'. For clearly, all the different phrase-classes are on an equal footing here - 'and' interacts in exactly the same way with the members of any class.

And so, as decent empirical Grammarians, we now move on to the semantics. The hunt is on for the AND-idea, a single, simple, semantic item to serve as the meaning of the word 'and'. The AND-idea must explain both the syntactical uniformity which we saw just now, and the massive semantic variation in output message which we saw earlier. A tall order? Read on....

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Semantics

'And' indeed does have a very simple meaning, a simple semantics. Just as the word 'and' coordinates lexical items by standing between them, so the AND-idea combines the meanings of those lexical items. Wherever it is deployed, it holds fast to the same, simple schema:

AND presents items as taken together

And that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know about the semantics of 'and'. It encodes exactly that, and nothing more: just that the meanings of the items flanking it are to be taken together. As we might say

'And' invites an integration.

Then whence all the semantic subtlety and flexibility we saw earlier? It comes precisely from what the word 'and' doesn't encode. There are many different ways to skin a cat, and many, many different ways to combine meanings. Indeed, the integration invited by an 'and' can be arranged in as many different ways as we humans have of combining things. Have another look at our list of 'and'-messages. This time I discuss them in some detail, case by case.

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Unsignalled Information

 

 

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Logic

 

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The Myths of the Logicians

 

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Each of the appended sentences has a natural interpretation on which the 'and' seems to contribute something quite particular to the message:

Tony and George laid waste to Iraq     -    Presumably they cooperated, and didn't just take turns.

Tony and Cherie got married     -    Presumably to one-another.

Posh Spice got married and had a baby     -    That seems the right way to do things.

Posh Spice had a baby and got married     -    Good God! Standards are falling everywhere.

Helen and Kinch are colleagues     -    Of each other, I take it

She left in a flood of tears and a sedan chair     -    Now why does that work as a witticism?

And now, the end is near....     -    There must have been an earlier episode of the story

I'll come when I'm good and ready     -    where the 'good' merely intensifies the 'ready'.

Mrs. Doyle talks and talks    -    Continuously, I presume.

The French like snails and garlic     -    In combination, one assumes.

Peter lied to Parliament and lost his portfolio     -    The second as a consequence of the first, no doubt.

Now, how does the same word manage to pull off all these different effects? How does it know which particular flavour to impart, case by case? Could it be that the word 'and' is multiply ambiguous, as many logicians have supposed? Read on...


Here again are just some of the multifarious ways in which English 'and' operates to make its contribution to output message. In each case, the effect is produced by the Hearer reading in a particular integration in his attempt to make overall sense of the message which the Speaker intends. Of course, in any actual case, the Hearer will have much collateral information to go on - it will not be a blind guess, a pure stab in the dark. There is, of course, no guarantee that the Hearer will get it right, because the information he reads in to complete the message is unsignalled information, not encoded anywhere in the broadcast sentence. But by and large, we English speakers are remarkably accurate in such matters. Disagreement on the appropriate integration is rare indeed. Click on the sentences to see them discussed.

Tony and George laid waste to Iraq 

Tony and Cherie got married    

Posh Spice got married and had a baby   

Posh Spice had a baby and got married   

She left in a flood of tears and a sedan chair   

And now, the end is near....  

I'll come when I'm good and ready   

Mrs. Doyle talks and talks  

The French like snails and garlic  

Peter lied to Parliament and had his portfolio withdrawn  

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Consider the sentence

Tony and George laid waste to Iraq.  

There is, of course, an interpretation of this sentence on which it reports quite separate episodes, with Tony devastating Iraq all on his own at one time, and George perpetrating another devastation at a later time. But the natural interpretation - in ordinary circumstances - would be that Tony and George collaborated in a single enterprise. In other words, the intended integration clued by 'and' is that Tony and George together laid waste to Iraq.

And since that is the natural interpretation, on those occasions when we might wish to convey a mesage concerning separate episodes, we often embroider our sentence in one way or another:

Tony and George both sent troops to Iraq

Tony and George each tried to influence Kofi Annan

And notice, while we are there, a further exhibition of the integrative impetus behind 'and'. We still tend to read in an integration, but now one of temporal order:

George and Tony each tried to influence Kofi Annan

rather suggests that they did it the other way round.

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Consider the sentence

Tony and Cherie got married.  

Again, this sentence will bear an interpretation on which Tony and Cherie got married to different people on different occasions. "How are the children getting on, Tom?" - "Well, Tony and Cherie got married last year, so they're off my hands, and Sally goes up to Balliol in October".

But the natural interpretation has them getting married to one-another. Here the integration clued by 'and' is that Tony and Cherie are to be taken as a couple.

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Consider this matched pair of sentences

Posh Spice got married and had a baby    

Posh Spice had a baby and got married.    

As (almost) always, such simple (unembroidered) sentences will bear an interpretation on which two separate events are related, with no sense of an implied order. "I remember that she married and had a baby, but I'm damned if I can now recall which came first.Who knows with young people nowadays?"

But the natural interpretation of each is that the two events ocurred in the order related. So that the integration here clued is that the two events are to be integrated into a single narrative.

Now some Logicians, Deflationists let us style them, want to argue that this effect is independent of the semantic power of AND. What we see operating here, they say, is a general convention of language use, on which the default convention is that you relate events in the order in which they occurred, on pain of misleading your audience.

And perhaps they are right in this particular case. But I mistrust their motives. The reason they so argue is that they want to be able to claim 'and' as a pure truth-functor, untainted by other semantic affects, whose basic syntactic role is to join sentences, and whose basic semantic role is to output a truth precisely when both input messages are truths.. So that then they can say that the message encoded in

Posh Spice had a baby and got married

is identical to the message encoded in

Posh Spice got married and had a baby,

both being equivalent to the bare conjunction

[P Q]

where 'P' stands for the proposition that Posh Spice got married, and 'Q' stands for the proposition that Posh Spice had a baby. Both sentences, for the committed Deflationist, broadcast the same True message, but one of those sentences will be a misleading way to express the truth.

Well, one quite understands the motive. If it turns out that English 'and' works in just the same way as '', then there is some chance of the Logician's Dream coming true, that The Propositional Calculus will provide an illuminating account of reasoning in English. But the Deflationist theory is then committed to explaining all uses of 'and' along the same lines. And when you look at the variety of uses of 'and' detailed in these pages, that looks to be a most unlikely story. It certainly has yet to be told: no Logician has even attempted a fully worked out picture of this kind.

Whereas my simple design, without need for extra ad hoc machinery case by case, seems set fair to account for the observed phenomena. Let me leave it to your intuition. Take the sentence

[*]     Gavrilo Princip stepped out of the crowd and shot Archduke Ferdinand.

For me, the natural interpretation integrates the two events it relates. And not just in temporal order, either. Princip didn't just step out of the crowd in Belgrade one day in May, and then later shoot Archduke Ferdinand on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo. The two events are of course in close temporal and spatial proximity, the one following immediately on the other, with no event of significance intervening. Princip didn't step out of the crowd, cross the street, wait for the Imperial carriage and only then shoot Ferdinand. As we say in English, he stepped out of the crowd and shot. More: the two events are also intentionally linked, part of the same intentional performance: Princip stepped out of the crown in order to shoot.

And all of this integrated into the single, overarching message which we broadcast with [*].

Or so, at least, say I. The Deflationist will have it instead that we would say something true with [*] even if the historical facts were that Princip shot Ferdinand on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo, and twenty years later stepped out of a crowd in New York to buy an ice-cream. True, but misleading.....

You decide. I'm tired.

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Now try this one:

She left in a flood of tears and a Sedan chair. 

Thus Oscar Wilde, in 'The Importance of being Ernest'. Quite a neat witticism. But why is the message thus encoded somehow incongruous, so that it gives you a jolt on the humour button?

In my design, it is because the 'and' invites an integration, and yet no integration is possible. In the sentence

She left in a flood of tears

the 'in' signals only a metaphorical and not a physical placement. She left crying, that's all. But in the sentence

She left in a Sedan chair

the 'in' signals a physical placement. The 'and' of the original sentence now invites you to integrate the meanings of the two adverbial phrases 'in a flood of tears' and 'in a Sedan chair' into a single semantic unit. As if  'a flood of tears and a Sedan chair' could be taken as apicking out a single complex of ideas.

But of course it can't - the 'in' has a different role in the two coordinands, and no integration is possible. Hence the jolt, as you try to put the two together in some way, and find that you can't.

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Here's a neat confirmation of my general thesis:

And now, the end is near, and as I face the final curtain....  

So sang Frank Sinatra, at any one of his twenty or thirty final farewell concerts. In fact, this was the third and final verse of the song. But I ask you to imagine it as the first line. And notice what happens when someone thus kicks off with an 'and'. In my design, 'and' is a coordinator, and it coordinates two items by standing between them. Yet here there are no coordinands: 'and' does not stand between two items, it prefixes one.

And what happens? Such is the integrative tug of 'and' that we invent in the imagination a previous episode of the story in order to give the 'and' something to coordinate. We imagine the line continuing on from something already extant.

Compare, for example the first line of a famous poem by Dylan Thomas. He could have begun

Death shall have no dominion. Dead men naked.....

But he didn't. Instead he wrote

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

Notice the difference in affect: that death shall have no dominion is presented in the poem as a conclusion, as following on from some previous consideration. As if the poet had been musing in silence, and only broke into song at that very moment....

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Here's a subtle little 'and'-effect:

I'll come when I'm good and ready. 

I dare say that a sufficiently tortuous mind could devise a scenario in which this sentence is used to express the thought that there are two separate requirements (goodness and readiness) whose absence inhibits my arrival. I'll leave that enterprise to the Logicians.

For as we all know, the standard and natural interpretation of this sentence has the phrase 'good and ready' operating as an indivisible unit, with the semantic effect of intensifying the requirement of readiness. Something to the effect of 'I'll come when I'm properly ready'. Notice again the affect: no natural integration of goodness and readiness springs to mind, so the goodness is absorbed into the readiness.

Similar effects abound. 'Nice and ...' is a parallel construction, conveying the adjectival sense of: 'nicely':

Slowly does it, now. Nice and easy.

I love Wagner. Nice and loud.

Or look how the 'try and ...' locution functions:

Please try and come early

I'm going to try and finish the chapter by midnight

You can't of course, just try, in the way in which you can just smoke, or just drink. You can only try to do something. So the natural integration here is into one single verb form. The above are near-as-dammit equivalent to

Please try to come early

I'm going to try to finish the chapter by midnight.

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Repetition of material affords some nice nuances. Consider

Mrs. Doyle talks and talks.  

She does, doesn't she? Indeed, I am not sure that this spare attribution does her justice. Perhaps better would be

Mrs. Doyle talks and talks and talks and talks and talks.... and talks and talks and talks... and talks and talks and talks....

Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo!

But considerations of space prevent me from fully capturing her habit. So let's stick with the original sentence. Normally 'and' stands between two different coordinands, and effects an integration betwen their meanings. But here, both coordinands are the same, and so have the same meaning, and so any combination or mixture of those meanings could only give us a message equivalent to that encoded by the dull

Mrs. Doyle talks

But 'and' is never idle. It always looks for integrative work to do, and it it has to invent something to integrate, it will. Here it takes the two 'talks' as picking out consecutive and overlapping episodes. She talks, and then she talks some more, and then...

With just the one repetition the sense is of continuity of performance over a longer period than you would normally expect.. Add a second repetition, and you convey a sense of the interminable. Compare:

Mrs. Thatcher droned on and on (for nearly an hour)

Mrs. Thatcher droned on and on and on (long after anyone could stay awake).

Examples abound:

This one will run and run

I'm going to spend and spend

Arabia is dull. Sand and sand and sand as far as the horizon and beyond.

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One very common way of taking things together is to take them in combination:

The French like snails and garlic 

This sentence has a bare truth-functional interpretation on which it reports two things that the French like. They like snails. And they like garlic. But a typical broadcast of the sentence would intend conveyed a stronger integration, namely that the French like snails and garlic in combination. They like snails with garlic.

You find this affect all over the place. Foodstuffs provide countless standard combinations: 'eggs and bacon', 'bread and butter', 'guinness and oysters' ..... And it doesn't stop there, of course. Take any area of human experience, and you find it littered with combinative 'and':

Love and marriage, love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage..

They are not long, the days of wine and roses..

Sun, sea, sex and sangría

Moonlight and love songs, never out of date...

I must stop. This is becoming far too nostalgic.

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When two narrated events are linked by AND, we often take them together consequentially, in both a temporal and a causal sense. Observe just how much causal explanation you read in as you make sense of these:

Peter gambled, and lost everything:

he lied to Parliament and had his portfolio withdrawn;

was shunned by his old friends and ended up in cardboard city;

took to drinking meths and destroyed his liver and his mind;

died an anonymous derelict and was buried in an unmarked grave. 

I suppose I can dream.

One final suggestion for you. These examples have barely scratched the surfaceof the AND phenomenon. It would be good practice for you to acquire the habit of noticing the occurrences of 'and' in the sentences you read, and pausing from time to time to work out precisely what integration you are reading in to the message.

 

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