[net.nlang] And as a non-logical conjuction - Request for pointers

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