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Rooth-Partee conditionals and the symmetry of disjunction

  • Yael Sharvit

    Yael Sharvit is Professor of Linguistics at UCLA, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Linguistics and Philosophy (Springer Nature). She has worked on questions, relative clauses, attitude reports, free indirect discourse, tense, and negative polarity items.

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Published/Copyright: December 16, 2025
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Abstract

It is argued that or is inherently symmetric, based on the intuitive equivalence of If x is P or Q, then y is and If x is Q or P, then y is – referred to as Rooth-Partee conditionals. As observed in Rooth and Partee [1982. Conjunction, type ambiguity and wide scope or. In Daniel P. Flickinger, Marlys Macken & Nancy Wiegand (eds.), Proceedings of WCCFL, vol. 1], the elided phrase in the consequent clause of these conditionals brings about a reading paraphrased as If x is P, y is P, and if x is Q, y is Q. Accounting for that reading proves to be problematic for asymmetric approaches to or, even those that rely on presupposition accommodation.


Corresponding author: Yael Sharvit, Department of Linguistics, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA. E-mail:

About the author

Yael Sharvit

Yael Sharvit is Professor of Linguistics at UCLA, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Linguistics and Philosophy (Springer Nature). She has worked on questions, relative clauses, attitude reports, free indirect discourse, tense, and negative polarity items.

Acknowledgments

For their input and help, I thank Sam Alxatib, Dylan Bumford, Simon Charlow, Emmanuel Chemla, Elena Guerzoni, Alejandro Pérez Carballo, Jacopo Romoli, Mats Rooth, Philippe Schlenker and Yasu Sudo. All errors are exclusively my fault.

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Published Online: 2025-12-16
Published in Print: 2025-11-25

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