The conjunction commutativity law does not hold in natural language: Difficulties in the search for syntactic support

Abstract

Orenes and Johnson-Laird gave arguments to show that the conjunction commutativity law, that is, the principle providing that the order of the conjuncts has no influence on a coordinating conjunction such as ‘and’, is not respected by natural language. Their point was that both semantics and pragmatics are more important than syntax, and that, for that reason, semantic and pragmatic factors can change the sense of a sentence with ‘and’ if the order of its conjuncts is reversed. This paper keeps following this direction and tries to argue that it is really hard to find syntactic characteristics in sentences that can explain changes such as those ones.