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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
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References: <3hbgfe$eks@mp.cs.niu.edu> <3he4k1$8nb@mp.cs.niu.edu> <D3swMp.Luz@hpl.hp.com> <3hgmh8$r2v@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 1995 22:28:54 GMT
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In article <3hgmh8$r2v@mp.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <rickert@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>In <D3swMp.Luz@hpl.hp.com> curry@hpl.hp.com (Bo Curry) writes:
>>But those are all grammatical ambiguities, which I don't deny.
>>The point is that the declarative forms "I saw John and Mary" and
>>"I saw John with Mary" have, in many contexts, precisely the
>>same meaning.
>
>That is absurd.  The meanings are not nearly the same.  Using "and",
>John and Mary are treated equally, while using "with" there is and
>unequal importance.  The use of "and" does not imply that John and
>Mary were together, but "with" does carry such an implication.

Linguists would probably say that the semantics *are* the same, but the
*pragmatics* differ.  Sciences often proceed by ignoring data (I'm reading
Feyerabend right now, can you tell?), and linguistics in the '60s tended
to ignore pragmatics, but since then it's received increasing attention.
(One of my favorite subjects, actually.)

'And' has some very interesting pragmatics, enough to confound attempts
to conflate it with the logicians' or computer scientists' AND.  For 
instance, it's not always commutative.  (When it isn't is left as an
exercise for the reader. :)

>>                                        The fact that I can
>>invert one, and not the other, is a fact about the syntactical
>>roles of "with" and "and", not about their semantic roles.
>
>No.  It is about the very clear semantic differences.

Well, even if you include pragmatics within semantics, this doesn't follow.
As I've pointed out elsewhere, nothing about the semantics (or pragmatics)
of "and" prevents you from querying one part of a conjunction: 

  You saw John and *who*?
  You saw John and ... [low, drawn out "and"]
  You saw John and someone, I forget who, who was that person?
