The local context of disjunction is not universal: A case study of Japanese

Abstract

Kurafuji (1998) observes that 'bathroom anaphora' is felicitous in Japanese with an overt pronoun, but not with a covert ‘pronoun.’ This study reexamines this observation. I argue that the infelicity of the overt pronoun should be attributed to the absence of the local context for the second disjunct. I also demonstrate that the covert ‘pronoun’ is not a genuine instance of bathroom anaphora. The covert argument results from eliding an indefinite through 'argument ellipsis'. The conclusion of this study implies that the local context of logical connectives is a locus of cross-linguistic/categorial variations.