stuart@rochester.UUCP (Stuart Friedberg) (03/12/84)
From: Stuart Friedberg <stuart> I am looking for pointers into the linguistic and natural language processing literature concerning the use of "and" in English as a non-logical conjunction. That is, the use of "and" often implies temporal sequence and/or causality. There is also a use introducing a verb complement. "Sheila took the ball and ran with it." "The lights were off and I couldn't see." "I will try and find the missing book." I understand that treatment of conjunction and ellipsis is difficult. Pointers to books, articles, theses, diatribes, etc. that (have sections that) deal with "and" in this extra-logical sense will be *much* more useful than pointers to more general treatments of conjunction and ellipsis. Useful things to know that I don't: What are (all?) the senses in which "and" may be used? Do all these interpretations apply to clause conjunction only? (Ie, not to noun conjunction, adverb conjunction, etc.) What knowledge is needed/useful to determine the sense of "and" in a given English sentence? (Given a knowledge of all the senses of "and", how to we eliminate some of them in a particular context?) Is it possible to expand Ross's constraints in a reasonable way to handle this kind of conjuction? (Constraints on variables in syntax, thesis, MIT, 1967, etc.) I have a few pointers already, but my only real linguistic source is several years old. I assume that additional work has been done from both linguistic and AI points of view. I am starting from: 1) Susan F. Schmerling, "Asymmetric Conjuction and Rules of Conversation", in Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3 (Speech Acts), Cole and Morgan (eds.), Academic Press, New York, 1975 2) Stan C. Kwasny, "Treatment of Ungrammatical and Extra-grammatical Phenomena in Natural Language Understanding Systems", Indiana University Linguistic Club, Bloomington, IN, 1980 Stu Friedberg {seismo, allegra}!rochester!stuart UUCP stuart@rochester ARPA Dept. Computer Science MAIL University of Rochester Rochester, NY 14627