Re 'and' (fwd)

[Edith A Moravcsik]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2000 12:11:50 -0500
From: "Kleanthes K. Grohmann" <grohmann at wam.umd.edu>
To: Edith A Moravcsik <edith at csd.uwm.edu>
Subject: Re: Re 'and'

Dear Edith,

Thanks for your reply. I must admit that I haven't thought that much about
this construction, and I'm not a native speaker. I wonder about your
comment:

> if John and Marry are a couple, you could still say "John 'n' Mary came
> separately.", where the togetherness is relative to their general
> relationship rather than relative to their coming.

First, I thought you wanted to force a togetherness reading without the
adverb. So, in this scenario simply saying "John'n'Mary came to the party"
would imply togetherness of coming, regardless of the relationship between
the two. If this is correct you CAN force the separate event interpretation
but must do so with the adverb. Is this clearer or am I still missing
something?

I'm curious now whether this is correct. I can see from a (formalist)
syntactic point of view how this would make sense if indeed correct,
especially with a relatively tight mapping from syntactic structure to
semantic interpretation; I'm sure other contracted forms follow a similar
pattern, but we'd have to consider more cases. By all means, feel free to
post anything from my mails to the list, maybe someone else will pick up on
it. If anything else crosses my mind, I'll let you know.

Best wishes,
Kleanthes



---------------------------------------------
Kleanthes K. Grohmann (grohmann at wam.umd.edu)

 *NEW* As of December 7, my PhD dissertation
 is available on-line for PDF-download here:

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Dept. of Linguistics, 1401 Marie Mount Hall
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