Why use or?

Mira Ariel; Caterina Mauri

doi:10.1515/ling-2018-0020

Article

Why use or?

Mira Ariel and Caterina Mauri

Published/Copyright: July 20, 2018

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From the journal Linguistics Volume 56 Issue 5

Abstract

Or constructions introduce a set of alternatives into the discourse. But alternativity does not exhaust speakers’ intended messages. Speakers use the profiled or alternatives as a starting point for expressing a variety of readings. Ever since (Grice, H. Paul. 1989. Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) and (Horn. 1972. On the semantic properties of the logical operators in English. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Los Angeles dissertation), the standard approach has assumed that or has an inclusive lexical meaning and a predominantly exclusive use, thus focusing on two readings. While another, “free choice”, reading has been added to the repertoire, accounting for the exclusive reading remains a goal all or theorists must meet. We here propose that both “inclusive” and “exclusive” interpretations, as currently defined, do not capture speakers’ intended readings, which we equate with the relevance-theoretic explicature. Adopting a usage-based approach to language, we examined all the or occurrences in the Santa Barbara Corpus of spoken American English (1053 tokens), and found that speakers use or utterances for a far richer variety of readings than has been recognized. In line with Cognitive Linguistics, we propose that speakers’ communicated intentions are better analyzed in terms of subjective construals, rather than the objective conditions obtaining when the or proposition is true. We argue that in two of these readings speakers are not necessarily committed to even one of the alternatives being the case. In the most frequent reading, the overt disjuncts only serve as pointers to a higher-level concept, and it is that concept that the speaker intends to refer to.

Keywords: disjunction; inclusive; exclusive; higher-level category; implicature; explicature; truth-compatible inference

Acknowledgements

The research reported on here was made possible by two Israel Science Foundation grants to Mira Ariel (ISF 161-09, 431/15) and by an Italian MIUR-SIR grant to Caterina Mauri (SIR n. RBSI14IIG0). We would like to thank Mira’s two dedicated research assistants, Ofir Zussman and Elitzur Dattner, for coding the enormous body of data and for very fruitful discussions of it. Special thanks to John W Du Bois for endless invaluable discussions. We thank Eric Berger for helping us analyze the math equation examples. This paper presents ideas developed together by the authors as part a long-term project on or constructions. Each of us is equally responsible for 100% of the contents of the paper. For the purposes of the Italian academic system, Sections 1-4 can be attributed to Mira Ariel and Sections 5-8 to Caterina Mauri.

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Appendix A: Or readings not here analyzed

Here are typical examples of the readings excluded from this paper, arranged in descending order of frequency. The main purpose of this appendix is to show that the classical analysis of or constructions as inclusive or exclusive is not at all based on the types of examples we too had to exclude due to space limitations.

1.	ALINA:	We had to go see !Jan last Sunday?
		.. at her house for dinner?
		(H) And- --
		*or breakfast*?
		(SBC: 006) (Repair)
2.	CAM:	well what do you mean,
		he’s gay or something,
		(SBC: 044) (Hedged X)
3.	LENORE:	He has a .. restaurant or something,
		(SBC: 006) (Member of a restricted higher-level category)
4.	DANNY: …	Our mission is a goal or task* which one is destined to accomplish*.
		(SBC: 030). (Equivalence)
5.	SHARON:	there’s a privacy code or whatever,
		(SBC: 004) (Provisional X)
6.	LINDSEY:	(H) .. she didn’t have any sores,
		*or anything*,
		(SBC: 018) (X widening)
7.	MELISSA:	I made some stupid comment,
		like why are you voting for them.
		(H)or something like that.
		(SBC: 019) (X or similar)
8.	LYNNE:	I mean whether the horse being used a lot or not,
		that’s twelve bucks.
		(SBC: 001) (Indifference)
9.	SHERI: …	*Is that*um,
		… full of yucky stuff?
		*Or what*.
		(SBC: 058) (‘I can’t imagine’)
10.	KEVIN:	Well it’s just a .. month or so,
		(SBC: 036). (Haloed X)
11.	ALINA:…	Was that nasty,
		*or what*.
		(SBC: 006) (Strengthened X)
12.	MONTOYO:	Would you say, ((1 LINE OMITTED))
		…that your parents were very much influenced by the Vietnam war?
		… One way or the other?
		(SBC: 012) (Some/any)

Published Online: 2018-07-20

Published in Print: 2018-08-28

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https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2018-0020

Keywords for this article

disjunction; inclusive; exclusive; higher-level category; implicature; explicature; truth-compatible inference