Clausal conjunction in Akan

The focus of this paper is the clausal coordinating connective nà in Akan, roughly corresponding to English and. Nà makes a conjunction of sentences optimally relevant when it has cognitive effects over and above the cognitive effects due to each of its conjuncts taken individually. Specifically the use of nà tells the interlocutor to look out for certain kinds of inferential relations between the conjuncts. These inferential relations, which become crucial in aiding the interlocutor to arrive at the intended interpretation of the utterance as a whole, could be temporal, causal, parallel, contrastive, and also the second conjunct can be interpreted as an explanatory comment on the information represented in the first conjunct. This paper is an attempt to account for what is semantically encoded as the meaning of nà. More significantly, it explores the pragmatics that influences the specific inferential relations between conjuncts. Specifically it examines the ways in which the logical form of an Akan conjunction of sentences is likely to be strengthened through context-dependent inference.