Friday, July 10, 2015

meaning - Two imperative clauses joined by coordinating conjunction taken as a conditional

I would be inclined to parse the sentence "Nobody move and nobody get hurt" as two commands:




  1. Nobody move.

  2. Nobody get hurt.




In other words, this is equivalent to "Nobody move or get hurt" (for nitpickers: assume conjunctive/inclusive or). As long as I'm only reading and not in a bank with armed gunmen, in which case I would probably ignore any possible grammatical issues.



This answer suggests that this is equivalent to "Nobody move and nobody gets hurt", which in turn is equivalent to "If nobody moves, nobody will get hurt".



Other sentences with a similar construction that come to mind are "Nobody move and nobody say a word" or "Nobody move and nobody shoot anyone" (vs. "Nobody move and nobody shoots anyone").



Admittedly all these sentences have a very strong contextual inference. In the last example, "Nobody move and nobody shoots anyone" clearly means "if nobody moves, nobody will shoot anyone", while "Nobody move and nobody shoot anyone" should be directed to the ones holding the guns: "Don't move and don't shoot anyone". "Nobody move and nobody shoot anyone" directed at people not able to shoot anyone and having guns pointed at, clearly doesn't mean the latter, however, is it a grammatically correct replacement of "Nobody move and nobody shoots anyone"?




In summary, my question is: can "Nobody move and nobody get hurt" be grammatically taken to mean "If nobody moves then nobody gets hurt" instead of "Nobody move or get hurt". Why or why not?

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