TY - JOUR
T1 - Interpreting conjunctions
AU - Bott, Lewis
AU - Frisson, Steven
AU - Murphy, Gregory L.
N1 - Funding Information:
Correspondence should be addressed to Lewis Bott, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Tower Building, Park Place, Cardiff, CF10 3AT, UK. E-mail: [email protected] This research was conducted while the first and second authors were at New York University. The first and third authors received support from National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Grant MH41704, awarded to Gregory L. Murphy, and the second author from National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant 0236732, awarded to Brian McElree. The authors are grateful to Robyn Kim for collecting data.
PY - 2009/1/8
Y1 - 2009/1/8
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Discourse
KW - Implicature
KW - Inference
KW - Pragmatics
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U2 - 10.1080/17470210802214866
DO - 10.1080/17470210802214866
M3 - Article
C2 - 18766985
AN - SCOPUS:67651021043
SN - 1747-0218
VL - 62
SP - 681
EP - 706
JO - Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
JF - Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
IS - 4
ER -