The project takes as its point of departure the generalisation found in Szabolcsi (2002), which has become a standard reference point in the literature on negation and disjunction, that natural languages differ in the way that their disjunction markers can be interpreted when embedded under negation. Examples (1) and (2) illustrate the contrast.
(1) Mary didn’t take hockey or algebra.
= ‘Mary took neither hockey nor algebra.’
In languages like English the most salient interpretation of (1) is that Mary took neither hockey nor algebra, whereas it is seldom interpreted as saying that Mary didn’t take either of hockey or algebra together but that she may very well have taken one of them but not the other.
Corresponding sentences in Hungarian, however, are interpreted in an entirely different manner:
(2) mari nem járt hokira vagy algebrára
Mari not went hockey.to or algebra.to
= ‘Mary didn’t take hockey and didn’t take algebra.’
= ‘Mary didn’t take hockey or didn’t take algebra.’
Szabolcsi (2002) proposes that the contrast between the English (1) and (2) from Hungarian lies in the status of vagy ‘or’ as a positive polarity item (PPI), whereas in English or does not have such a status.
Languages that have been argued to pattern with English as far as the interpretation of disjunction under negation is concerned include German and Dutch, whereas Romanian, Russian and Japanese are named as belonging to the same class of languages as Hungarian.
In this talk I revisit Szabolcsi’s (2002) generalisation as it applies to Russian, focusing on two potential problems: (i) the availability of only the conjunctive interpretation in negated copular clauses and (ii) the degraded status of Russian counterparts to (2).
This is an invited talk at the Syntax Interface Lectures series at Utrecht University.
- The handout for this talk is available.
