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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The cancellation of temporal ordering in 'I got drunk and I drove home (but not in that order)' does not prove 'and' is unambiguous.

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.The cancellation could instead indicate the resolution of a temporal variable assigned to present tense markers.
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    • 2.Alternatively, 'and' may signal multiple possible discourse relations, and the cancellation disambiguates between them.
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    • 3.Lepore and Stone (2016) argue that disambiguators are more widespread than assumed, suggesting cancellation tests may mask ambiguities rather than rule them out.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Grice's Modified Occam's Razor demands we not multiply senses beyond necessity when a pragmatic implicature suffices to explain apparent meaning shifts.
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    • 2.The temporal reading of 'and' arises from world-knowledge about event sequences, not from any lexical feature of 'and' itself.
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    • 3.If cancellation were merely resolving a temporal variable, we would expect infelicity in contexts where no such variable is salient, but 'and' remains felicitous regardless.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson) predicts that connectives encode procedural meaning that constrains inferential processes without encoding propositional content.
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    • 2.Under a procedural account, 'and' encodes conjunction of propositional forms, and temporal ordering is an inferential enrichment governed by the Principle of Relevance, not a lexical ambiguity.
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    • 3.Lepore and Stone's disambiguator proliferation concern backfires here: postulating a temporally ambiguous 'and' multiplies lexical entries precisely where relevance-theoretic enrichment already provides a leaner, unified explanation.
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