The Interpretation of Noun Phrases Connected With And

Jeff Kaufman

One aspect of English that we have not yet considered is how the conjunction and should be interpreted when it conjoins noun phrases. Consider the following examples:

1. In subject position:
   1. John and Mary ate.
   2. John and Mary met.
   3. John and Mary kissed.
   4. John and Mary bumped.
   5. John and Mary collided.
   6. John and Mary voted.
   7. John and Mary attend Swarthmore.
2. In object position:
   1. John ate pizza and cabbages.
   2. John met Mary and Bob.
   3. John bumped Mary and Bob.
3. In both:
   1. John and Mary ate pizza and cabbages.
   2. John and Mary met Bob and Sue.
   3. John and Mary bumped Bob and Sue.
   4. John and Mary attend Swarthmore and Haverford.

Let's take the generic syntactic structure to be as follows:

$N''$ and $N''$ 3$N''$ $V$ $N''$ and $N''$ 3$N''$ 2$V''$ 2$S$

We had defined the extensions of $N''$ s such as John and Mary to be entities, but that would be a stretch to use here. In 1f, for example, we could evaluate by seeing if the set of things that have voted contains an entity JohnAndMary which represents John and Mary considered as a group. This would be incredibly wasteful, as then the set would need to contain every possible combination of voters, taking us from a set of cardinality $N$ to one of cardinality $N!$ .

A much nicer evaluation is to say that 1f is true when it is true that John voted and that Mary voted. This sort of evaluation would also work with ate and attend. When we try to apply it to met or bumped, however, we run into problems. Applying it to 1b we might think that 1b would be true when it is true that John met and that Mary met but the real interpretation is closer to that 1b is true when John met Mary and Mary met John are true.