Disjunction and Implicatures: Some Notes on Recent Developments

Abstract

The paper considers three features of disjunction that played a role in recent discussions relating to the question of whether implicature computation is pragmatic and global or grammatical and local: Hurford’s constraint, free choice inferences, and the mutual exclusivity of double disjunctions. The paper argues that both Hurford’s constraint data and the free choice phenomena are consistent with a pragmatic, global approach to scalar implicatures if it is enriched with a lexical repair strategy. Furthermore to derive the mutual exclusivity of double disjunctions, a global approach taking scope over both disjuncts is necessary, since I show that local computation of scalar implicatures within on of the disjuncts would make wrong predictions. I conclude therefore that in the absence of other arguments for a grammatical approach, the pragmatic global account provides a better explanation.

This paper was originally written up in 2009 and parts of it were presented at PARC in Palo Alto, California, and the Semantics Research Group at the University of Tokyo. I am very grateful for their helpful comments to the audiences at both venues and also to Ezra Keshet and Chungmin Lee. Since 2009, I have done more work on the comparison of pragmatic and grammatical approaches to scalar implicatures, and my more recent results speak against the pragmatic and in favor of the grammatical approach (see Sauerland 2011, 2014). This is consistent with the results in this paper since the convincing evidence comes from more complex examples than those considered here.