Disjunction and Implicatures: Some Notes on Recent Developments

Abstract

The paper considers three features of disjunction that played a role in recent discussions relating to the question of whether implicature computation is pragmatic and global or grammatical and local: Hurford’s constraint, free choice inferences, and the mutual exclusivity of double disjunctions. The paper argues that both Hurford’s constraint data and the free choice phenomena are consistent with a pragmatic, global approach to scalar implicatures if it is enriched with a lexical repair strategy. Furthermore to derive the mutual exclusivity of double disjunctions, a global approach taking scope over both disjuncts is necessary, since I show that local computation of scalar implicatures within on of the disjuncts would make wrong predictions. I conclude therefore that in the absence of other arguments for a grammatical approach, the pragmatic global account provides a better explanation.