Written Report In Structure of

The English Language

Coordinating Conjunction

Hans Cristian P. Galendez

Mr. Emejidio Gepila Jr.

The Meaning and Use Of Coordinating Conjunction

A straightforward account of the meaning of the coordinatiing conjunctions
might look like this:

Conjunction
And

Meaning
Plus

But

So

Show
contrast
But at the
same time
Therefore

For

Because

Or

One or the
other
alternatives
is true
Conjoins two
negative
sentences,
both of which
are true

Yet

Nor

Example
Kharxz and Karz are going into business
together.
Kharxz is hardworking, but Karz is lazy.
Karz is lazy, yet well inentioned.
Neither man had much money, so they
decided to collaborate.
I hope they succeed, for this has been a
dream come true for both men.
They are determined to make it or to go
bakruptin the process.

Kharxz doesnt give up easily, nor does Karz.

While this account may well be satisfactory for low level ESL/EFL
students, its straightforwardness is deceptive.
AND
-AS LOGICAL OPERATOR
The general idea is that the truth of the statement
Stu is a cook and Fred is a waiter.
is a function of the truth of each individual conjunct. So as long as the
conjuct is true, then the entire conjoined statement is true; if one conjucnt is
false, the statement is false.
However, once we get beyond such stilted-sounding sentences to ones
which are likely to be uttered more frequently, problem arise:
Fred fell down, and he hurt his foot badly.
* Fred hurt his foot badly, and he fell down.

The problem in the second sentence does not lie in the question of
whether and is truth-conditional or not: after all, it is true that if Fred fell
down and hurt hs foot, the Fred did hurt his foot, and he did fall down. The
problem is that the heare concludes in the first case that Freds hurting his
foot was a result of his habing fallen. If the order of claused reversed, as in
the second example above, we do not come to that conclusion; if anything,
we might conclude the opposite: that his falling was the result of his foot
injury.
-AS MARKER OF MANY MEANINGS
There would therefore be ambiguity in the word and; as in other case s
of lexical ambiguity, the listener or reader simply has to figure out from the
context of utterances whether one meaning or the other is intended.
-AS INFERENTIAL CONNECTIVE
Blakemore (1992) argues that when we use the conjunction and, we
may intend to draw the listeners/readers attention to something over and
above what is expressed by the individual conjuncts; the use of and is
motivated, in other words, by the desire to have the listener/reader draw an
inferential connection, one that is not stated but implied.
-AS MARKER OF SPEAKER CONTINUATION
Schiffrin (1987) examine the conjunction and as mark of speakercontinuation, with which a speaker signals that the discourse to follow is in
some way connected with what has come before. The connection may be
away to seize back a conversional turn that has been interrupted by
someone else, thereby indicating that the original speaker has not finished.
A speaker who wishes to continue a monologue, but needs to catch his o her
breath, does well, then, to signal this wish by ending with an uttered and just
prior to pause.
BUT AND YET
One type of contrast is usually called denial-of-expectation. This use,
often called adversative, has to do with the violation of reasonable
expectation: what is expected after a reading of the first conjunct turns out
not to be true from a reading of the second. Some examples are the
following:
He is friendly but/yet introverted.

He worked slowly but/yet diligently.

They tried for three hours to steer the boat from storm, but/yet
the boat
sank.
Theyve had a terrible time up to now, but/yet theyll probably
succeed in the end.
She told us that Athens was in this direction, but/yet shes
mistaken.
As such examples show, but/yet may be used where the violation of
expectations is not especially strong; in the last example above, it is not
necessary that we expect the directions that people give to be correct all the
time. However, we do tend to trust others directions, and we find our trust
misplaced if the directions are faulty; so the issue of expectation probably
plays a part in the choice of conjunction.
-AS MARKER OF SEMANTIC CONTRAST
The other major use of but involves a real semantic contrast, one in
which exactly two entities or qualities are set adjacent to each other in order
to focus on one or more semantic differences in them. Most often they may
involve polar opposition, but the following examples show that they need to
do so:
Winter is warm in Miami but cold in Moscow.
This is not a rose but a geranium.
Nimbus clouds threaten rain, but cirrus clouds do not.
Although it is possible to imagine circumstances in which some of
these sequences might involve denials of expectations, in general no real
denials of expectations need be present here.
-AS MARKER OF SPEAKER-RETURN
When seen as a discourse marker, but can be, among other things, a
sign of speaker-return: when one party to a conversation has strayed for
some reason from the main point of monologue, but can be used to mark the
attempt to recover the last point.
OR
-INCLUSIVE OR

The meaning of the conjunction or has been characterized by logicallyoriented linguists in a truth-conditional way: any sentence X or Y is true so
long as one of its conjuncts is true. If both the conjuncts are false, the
statement is false; if both are true, the statement is true. Thus if someone
says,
Well serve carrots or (well serve) peas.
with are out a specific commitment to doing only one of these things, one
might normally say that the conditions of the statement are fulfilled as long
as we do one or both of these things; it is unlikely that if we serve both
carrots and peas someone would accuse us of having spoken falsely.
-EXCLUSIVE OR
Logicians might insists, as those in Gamut (1991) do, that problems are
matters of context, not of word meaning: whatever the world is like, it still
holds that the semantic meaning of simple or is the logical one.
We thus seem to have a problem similar to that for and, where
semantic meaning and pragmatic meanings are confounded. Since
ambiguities can arise through mismatched intentions, English does have
correlative form either . . . or, which seems, for most speakers, to have the
exclusive readings. The sequences
(a) either X or Y but not both . . . (= exclusive)
(b) either X or Y or both . . . (= inclusive)
(c) X and/or Y . . . (= inclusive or exclusive)
serve the same purpose in an even more emphatic way.
-AS WARNING
Or may have additional senses that go beyond the inclusive-exclusive
distinction. One involves an imperative, or quasi-warning, sentence followed
by statement of consequence:
Stop the loud music, or I will call the police.
Buy me that toy, or I will scream
You have to fix the car, or we cant go on our trip.

In such cases or may be paraphrased lexically as otherwise. These

sentences may also be naturally paraphrased syntactically with such
conditional structures as
If you do not stop that loud music, (then) I will call the police.
If you do not buy me that toy, (then) I will scream.
If you do not fix the car, (then) we cant go on our trip.
Once again, given a more fully explicated form of imperatives, a
logician would likely hold or to the constant semantic meaning while leaving
the pragmatics to others.
-IN PARAPHRASE
A further use of or is somewhat more puzzling:
This is a matsutake, or pine mushroom.
The boards have to be mitered, or cut at an angle.
Or is frequently use in this way at the phrasal level in definitions or
paraphrases. While the reading of or in that sentence is necessarily
exclusive, in the two sentences above, the reading seems necessarily
inclusive. Pragmatically, there seems to be something metalinguistic
happening in such sequences

-AS SELF-CORRECTION DEVICE

At the clausal level, this metalinguistic version of or shows up in what
often appear as self-corrections when a speaker has not expressed himself or
herself satisfactorily. For example:
We have to help the children. Or, more precisely, we have to
help them to help themselves.
You are a joy to be around. Or, to put it another way, I love you.
Here, the or may be interpreted in reference to the prior statement
itself in such a way as to suggest, What I intended in the first sentence
was . . .

These uses of or do not necessarily matched the full range of uses of

any single word in other languages.
SO
The conjunction so might be seen essentially as the marker that relates
causes with results, as in
The rope broke, so the box fell down
She has a cold, so she wont be coming with us today.
However, Blakemore (1988) calls so more generally an inferential
markerthat is, a conjunction that relates an inference in the second clause
to a proposition in the first. For Blakemore, the causal reading is what she
calls an enriched interpretation. It is possible to use so where no
expression of cause is desired, but where logical inferences are strong, as in
example like:
Theres five dollars in my wallet, so I didnt spend all my money
then.
The cars in the garage, so Susan must be here.
This use of so can be used across interlocutors, where one supplies the
initial proposition and the other supplies in the inference:
A: The LGB Corporation has just gone out of business.
B. So weve lost our investment.
So may even be used, as Blakemore points out, where no prior
utterance at all has occurred. What unifies all of these uses of so is that
while logical inferences may or may not always be present, the
listener/reader will always be cued to the construction of some kind of
inference as his or her main task.
AND/OR ALTERNATION IN AFFIRMATIVE AND NEGATIVE STRUCTURES
One final comment on the meanings of conjunctions has to do with the
alternation between and and or structures in affirmative and negative
statements, respectively. Consider the following sets:
a. They have a house and a car.
b. They dont have a house and a car.

c. They dont have a house or a car.

Most native speakers of English will tend to find the proper negation of
the proposition expressed in (a) to be (c), not (b), although negation seems
to have operated on (b) in the normal way.
What sentence (c) expresses is:
It is not true that they have a house. It is also not true they have
a car.
In contrast to that, they typical logical interpretation of the (b)
sentence is:
It is not true that they have both a house and a car. It is true
that they have either a house or a car.
We find a parallel in the structure already presented in Chapter 10: the
alteration between some and any. Recall that the standard negation of
She has some books.
is the sentence:
She doesnt have any books.
Recall, too, that the sentence:
She doesnt have some books.
admits of the interpretation:
There are some books that she doesnt have.
implying that there are some books that she does have. As is true with the
some/any distinction, the and/or alternation is likely to be the source of many
learner errors; the two structures may even merit treatment together in
class.