The conjunction and : literal meaning and discourse values

In this paper we aim at showing that: 1) the conjunction “and” can uniformly formalized with “^” only at the cost of distorting the syntactic structures of the sentences in which “and” conjuncts indefinite NPs and adjectives. Furthermore “^” gives incorrect truth conditions when it formalizes the occurrences of “and” in which it conjuncts nouns and NPs that are arguments of collective verbs. 2) “and” expresses a very poor semantic meaning, while all other meanings it seems to carry are the result of pragmatics implicatures bound to specific discursive contexts. In the final section of the paper we sketch out a minimalist semantic theory of the meaning of “and” different from the usual one which identifies the meaning of “and” with the function expressed by “^”.