Do Languages Have Exclusive Disjunctions?

Abstract

Most natural languages have more than one linguistic form available to express disjunction. One of these forms is often reported by native speakers to be more exclusive than the other(s) and, in recent years, it has been claimed that some languages may in fact have dedicated exclusive disjunctions. In this paper, we report on a series of experiments testing this claim across five languages of primary interest. Results show important variation in the rates of exclusive interpretation associated with the different particles used to express disjunction in these languages. Crucially, our findings show that, while complex disjunctions are usually perceived as more exclusive than their simple counterparts cross-linguistically, even the most exclusive disjunctions remain ambiguous between an inclusive and an exclusive interpretation. We discuss what factors may play a role in accounting for the gradient exclusivity effects observed in our data and how to model these effects in pragmatic and grammatical accounts of scalar implicatures.