Overview

This book opens by accounting for the felicity conditions on clausal disjunctions in terms of general principles of information update, and goes on to demonstrate that these conditions provide the basis for an account of both the presupposition projection properties of disjunction, and the possibility of anaphora between disjuncts. It is argued that presuppositions of disjuncts project except where projection would result in infelicity. Similarly, it is argued that while the semantics of pronoun interpretation allow for cross-disjunct anaphora, in certain configurations this anaphora results in infelicitous disjunctions. Cross-disjunct anaphora is given an E-type treatment; some novel data are considered which support this approach. Throughout the book, it is emphasized that while principles of information update play an important explanatory role with respect to the phenomena discussed, these principles are pragmatic and not semantic. What or contributes to the semantics is the expression of Boolean join. This approach challenges Dynamic Semantic treatments of the same phenomena. The work also treats anaphora between NPs contained inside a disjunction and a pronoun in a following sentence. It is shown that existing E-type theories cannot be applied to these data. An alternative E-type account is developed, which provides a set of recursive rules for deriving the interpretation of an unbound anaphoric pronoun from the content of the antecedent clause.

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