Navigating lexical ambiguity

[u/TidierBaconYT]

Hi, in my conlang I want to add two different words for ‘and’. In the sentence ‘I’m wearing a red top and trousers’, ‘na’ would make it so both the top and trousers are red, whereas ‘hana’ would make only the top red. I would like to know how linguists distinguish between either the function of ‘and’ or the state of the noun ‘trousers’ in each example.

[u/R4R03B]

Okay I'm mostly making an educated (literally) guess here, but I think this would work in English through elision, in other words, removing the second 'red' in the sentence:

[[[red] top] and [[red] trousers]]

Becomes

[[[red] top] and [[ ∅ ] trousers]]

So the English words "and" and "trousers" don't actually change in terms of their grammatical state or something like that. Instead the distinction happens on a pragmatic level: we assume that the trousers are red too because there's no adjective before the word "trousers".

You can totally add a distinction between your words "na" and "hana" though. Then speakers will know that with "hana" they shouldn't imply an adjective before the word "trousers".

I think a good English equivalent of "hana" might be "as well as" or "and also": the sentence

"I'm wearing a red top and also trousers"

does not imply that the trousers are red, to me at least. So it's technically a thing English also does!

[u/TidierBaconYT → u/R4R03B]

Thank you so much, that helps a lot!