On the interpretation of disjunction: Asymmetric, incremental, and eager for inconsistency (original) (raw)

Hurford's conditionals (final version)

to appear in Journal of Semantics

Disjunctions in which a disjunct entails the other, 'John is either in Paris or France', have been noticed to be infelicitous since Hurford 1974 and Gazdar 1979. This phenomenon was initially taken to be a generalization about the pragmatics of disjunctions, generally called 'Hurford's constraint.' More recently, there have been a number of attempts in the literature to derive this generalization from more general constraints about triviality and assertability conditions. Two approaches have been proposed, one based on a brevity condition (Katzir & Singh 2013, Meyer 2013) and one based on the notion of local contexts (Singh 2008a, Schlenker 2009). In this paper, we discuss a novel problem for both of these approaches arising with conditionals constructed out of Hurford disjunctions, which we call Hurford conditionals. We point out a surprising contrast between two different Hurford conditionals: first, 'If John isn't in Paris, he is in France'; second, 'If John is in France, he isn't in Paris'. The second of these is felicitous, while the first is not; we show that no extant theory can account for this surprising contrast.

Hurford disjunctions: embedded exhaustification and structural economy

Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeuting 18, p.201-216, 2014

Hurford's Constraint, which bans disjunctions in which one disjunct entails the other, has been central to the debate between the pragmatic and the grammatical view on Scalar Implicatures. We provide evidence that Hurford's Constraint should be derived from more basic principles, and we propose such a derivation using a pragmatic prohibition against redundant constituents. In a first, more conservative version, the redundancy is specific to disjunctions. In a second, more general version, redundancy is banned regardless of constituent type. Both versions make new predictions about the emergence of oddness in cases that are not covered by Hurford's Constraint. The first version is too restricted. The second one is incorrect. We explore a revised architecture in which the relevant redundancy principle applies locally in the semantic computation. This perspective makes different predictions about oddness than the first two and has a potentially interesting extension to oddness in quantificational constructions, which we discuss. All our attempts to generalize Hurford's Constraint require the grammatical theory of Scalar Implicatures.

Or 1 Linguistic-pragmatic factors in interpreting disjunctions

2015

The connective or can be treated as an inclusive disjunction or else as an exclusive disjunction. Though researchers are aware of this distinction, few have examined the conditions under which each interpretation should be anticipated. Based on linguistic-pragmatic analyses, we assume that interpretations are initially inclusive before either a) remaining so, or; b) becoming exclusive by way of an implicature (but not both). We point to a class of situations that ought to predispose disjunctions to inclusive interpretations and to situations that encourage exclusive interpretations. A disjunction's ultimate interpretation is based on its potential informativeness, where the interpretation of the disjunctive utterance having the smallest number of true conditions is considered most informative. Our investigation leads to five experiments employing arbitrary materials. Among the problems expected to encourage inclusive interpretations are those that present disjunctions in the an...

Hurford's constraint and the theory of scalar implicatures

… and Implicatures–Proceedings of the MIT-Paris …, 2009

⇤ Authors' names are listed alphabetically. 1 Chierchia's (2004) also argued that scalar implicatures are not derived by purely pragmatic and non-compositional mechanisms, but are computed compositionally, on a par with other aspects of sentence meaning. But Chierchia's (2004) precise implementation did not resort to an implicature-computing operator present in the logical forms of the relevant sentences.

Linguistic-pragmatic factors in interpreting disjunctions

Thinking & Reasoning, 2002

The connective or can be treated as an inclusive disjunction or else as an exclusive disjunction. Though researchers are aware of this distinction, few have examined the conditions under which each interpretation should be anticipated. Based on linguisticpragmatic analyses, we assume that interpretations are initially inclusive before either a) remaining so, or; b) becoming exclusive by way of an implicature (but not both). We point to a class of situations that ought to predispose disjunctions to inclusive interpretations and to situations that encourage exclusive interpretations. A disjunction's ultimate interpretation is based on its potential informativeness, where the interpretation of the disjunctive utterance having the smallest number of true conditions is considered most informative. Our investigation leads to five experiments employing arbitrary materials. Among the problems expected to encourage inclusive interpretations are those that present disjunctions in the antecedents of conditionals and in question forms. The best candidates to produce implicatures are those disjunctions that underdetermine an expected conjunctive conclusion, though other disjunctive utterances that are more informative as exclusive are discussed and tested.

Counterfactuals, hyperintensionality and Hurford disjunctions

Linguistics and Philosophy, 2023

This paper investigates propositional hyperintensionality in counterfactuals. It starts with a scenario describing two children playing on a seesaw and studies the truth-value predictions for counterfactuals by four different semantic theories. The theories in question are Kit Fine’s truthmaker semantics, Luis Alonso-Ovalle’s alternative semantics, inquisitive semantics and Paolo Santorio’s syntactic truthmaker semantics. These predictions suggest that the theories that distinguish more of a given set of intensionally equivalent sentences (Fine and Alonso-Ovalle’s) fare better than those that do not (inquisitive semantics and Santorio’s). Then we investigate how inquisitive semantics and Santorio can respond to these results. They can respond to them by helping themselves to considerations from Hurford disjunctions, disjunctions whose disjuncts stand in an entailment relation to one another. I argue that considerations from Hurford disjunctions are ad hoc modifications to less fine-grained theories to predict the expected results and they are not independently motivated. I conclude that the scenarios suggest a need for more fine-grained theories of sentential meaning in general.

On when a disjunction is informative

In this paper we investigate the topic of ambiguous connectives, as it was recently explored by Paoli, from an informational perspective. That is, starting from the framework of informational pluralism (Allo, 2007a, 2007b), we ask what it means for a message of the form ‘A or B’, to be informative. Using these disjunctive messages as an example, we answer three traditional objections to substructural logic and logical pluralism, and eventually show that the linear or relevant logician’s road to unambiguous connectives is consistent with informational pluralism.

Scalar implicatures of embedded disjunction

Sentences with disjunction in the scope of a universal quantier, Every A is P or Q, tend to give rise to distributive inferences that each of the disjuncts holds of at least one individual in the domain of the quantier, Some A is P & Some A is Q. These inferences are standardly derived as an entailment of the meaning of the sentence together with the scalar implicature that it is not the case that either disjunct holds of every individual in the domain of the quantier, ¬Every A is P & ¬Every A is Q (plain negated inferences). As we show, this derivation faces a challenge in that distributive inferences may obtain in the absence of plain negated inferences. We address this challenge by showing that on particular assumptions about alternatives, a derivation of distributive inferences as scalar implicatures can be maintained without in fact necessitating plain negated inferences. These assumptions accord naturally with the grammatical approach to scalar implicatures. We also present experimental data that suggest that plain negated inferences are not only unnecessary for deriving distributive inferences, but might in fact be unavailable. Keywords Scalar implicatures • Disjunction • Embedded exhaustication 1 Distributive inferences Disjunction in the scope of a universal quantier tends to give rise to existential inferences pertaining to each of the disjuncts, specically, the inferences