English Conjunctions

There are certain English conjunctions that do more than just connect sentences; some have implications that will lead us to grasp meanings that may not be originally intended. In the following text, I will try to demonstrate the above with the conjunctions “if” & “and.”

Sentences that begin with “if” are one-way conditionals, but we often take them as biconditionals. For example, consider the sentence “If you mow my lawn, I’ll give you ten dollars.” We tend to hear it as an “if and only if” instead of a mere “if;” that is, we immediately think that if you don’t mow my lawn, I won’t give you ten dollars. What we neglect here is the fact that I can still give you ten dollars even if you do nothing and the statement would still be logical. In logic terms, the latter (B) of the proposition “If A, B” can occur without A; in other words, A is not the sole condition for B to happen. Consider the sentence “If it rains, the ground will be wet.” We can easily imagine on a sunny day, a person decides to wet the ground with a bucket of water, making “the ground will be wet” true. What seems to be the problem in the original sentence is that in our everyday lives, we seldom get money from doing nothing. As a result, we automatically assume that we have to do something before we receive money in all similar scenarios where such exchanges are expected.

Now let us take a look at the conjunction “and.” Whenever we hear sentences that are linked with “and,” we have a tendency to think that the conjunction carries a kind of causal attribute. For instance, the statement “Fiona watched the school burning and smiled with pleasure.” Most people upon hearing the sentence would likely to think that Fiona was caused pleasure by seeing the school burning. But the statement literally says one thing happened and then something else did. Compare the above with the sentence “Fiona watched the school burning and scratched