The proper treatment of the wide scope or reading of the English either ... or ... construction

Abstract

The main concern of this paper is the availability of the wide scope or reading in the English either ... or ... construction and its interaction with the behavior of either. I propose that a hybrid analysis consisting of an ellipsis analysis (Schwarz, 1999), which directly arises from the requirement of or that it connect disjuncts of the same type, and a choice function analysis of either (cf. Winter (2001); Schlenker (2006) for a choice function analysis of or) explains the whole data set. I also discuss a prediction the present analysis makes and some remaining issues, including a data issue in which the judgments made by my informants differ from the ones observed in a previous study.