The pragmatics of sentential coordination with and

It is well known that utterances of certain and-conjunctions communicate a range of temporal and consequence relations between the states of affairs described by their conjuncts, and there are well established pragmatic accounts of how these elements of meaning arise. Our main focus in this paper is on a different set of and-conjunction utterances, which have so far received much less attention. These examples do not have a narrative function, so temporal and causal relations are not at issue. There are broadly two types of case: those that play an argumentational role and those that express an attitude of surprise/disquiet to the co-occurrence of two states of affairs. We develop a relevance-theoretic pragmatic account of the full range of interpretations and show how it is able to explain (i) the interpretive disparities between and-utterances and the corresponding cases with but, and (ii) why and may be used together with some discourse markers, such as moreover, but not with others.