Exclusivity and exhaustivity of disjunction(s): a cross-linguistic study

Abstract

Most natural languages have more than one linguistic form available to express disjunction. One of these forms is often reported by native speakers to be more exclusive than the other(s) and, in recent years, it has been claimed that some languages may in fact have dedicated exclusive disjunctions. In this paper, we report on a series of verification studies investigating the robustness of the exclusivity inference associated with different disjunction markers within and across five different languages and extend this investigation to another, related type of inference, namely the exhaustivity inference. In our results, we found that complex disjunctions were generally more likely to be interpreted exclusively than simplex ones and that, in some languages, further differences exist among the complex disjunctions. Exhaustivity inferences were much less robust and, by contrast, showed little-to-no difference among disjunction types. We lay out possible directions for interpreting these results.