Two alternatives for disjunction: An inquisitive reconciliation

Open Access
Authors
Publication date 2019
Host editors
  • M. Zimmermann
  • K. von Heusinger
  • E. Onea
Book title Questions in Discourse. - Volume 2
Book subtitle Pragmatics
ISBN
  • 9789004378315
ISBN (electronic)
  • 9789004378322
Series Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface
Pages (from-to) 251–274
Publisher Leiden: Brill
Organisations
  • Interfacultary Research - Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)
  • Faculty of Science (FNWI)
Abstract
There are two prominent treatments of disjunction in formal semantics. Traditionally, disjunction is taken to express an operator that applies to any two elements A and B of a Boolean algebra and yields their join. In particular, if A and B are propositions, then disjunction delivers their union, . Another, more recent proposal is to treat disjunction as expressing an operator that can apply to any two objects of the same semantic type, and yields the set consisting of these two objects. In particular, if disjunction applies to two propositions A and B, it delivers a set of propositional alternatives, . Each of the two approaches has certain merits that the other one lacks. Thus, it would be desirable to reconcile the two, combining their respective strengths. This paper shows that this is indeed possible, if we adopt a notion of meaning that does not just take truth-conditional, informative content into consideration, but also inquisitive content.
Document type Chapter
Language English
Published at https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004378322_009
Published at http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/WViZDBhM/paper.pdf
Downloads
paper2 (Accepted author manuscript)
9789004378322-BP000008 (Final published version)
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