Hurford disjunctions: Beyond redundancy and triviality

Abstract

We present two experiments on Hurford Disjunctions (Hurford, 1974, and much subsequent work) and their conjunctive counterparts, testing key predictions of the two dominant approaches in the literature: the Non-Redundancy approach (Katzir and Singh, 2013) and the Non-Triviality approach (Schlenker, 2009). Our results challenge core predictions of both accounts, suggesting that neither fully captures the actual patterns. We explore the implications of these findings and argue that the notion of super-redundancy, introduced by Kalomoiros (2023a), provides a promising framework for explaining our results. Finally, we draw connections to recent developments in the literature on presuppositions, particularly to insights from Mandelkern et al. (2020) and Kalomoiros and Schwarz (2024), which could help refine our theoretical account of redundancy phenomena.