Core and peripheral disjunction strategies in Russian: Their interaction with sentential negation

February 6, 2016

This paper’s point of departure is the generalisation in Szabolcsi (2002) that natural languages differ in the way that their disjunction markers can be interpreted when embedded under negation.

(1) Mary doesn’t speak German or Polish.
= Mary doesn’t speak German and she doesn’t speak Polish.

Corresponding sentences in Hungarian are interpreted exclusively: either Mary doesn’t speak German or she doesn’t speak Polish (Szabolcsi 2002). Szabolcsi (2002) proposes that the contrast between English and Hungarian lies in the status of Hungarian ‘or’ as a positive polarity item, in contrast to English or. In this talk I take a closer look at Russian, a language that Szabolcsi (2002) places in the Hungarian class, by revisiting Szabolcsi’s generalisation as it applies to Russian.

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I’m Pavel Rudnev, and this is my personal website. I’m a research fellow and lecturer in linguistics at HSE University in Moscow. My main area of interest is syntax and its interfaces with sound and meaning. In particular, my current research revolves around the structure of nominal expressions, agreement, case and verbal morphosyntax in East Caucasian languages, and the syntax-to-phonology mapping in Russian Sign Language.

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