The Union of Conjunction and Disjunction: The Case of and/or

Brent Woo

doi:10.3765/plsa.v2i0.4093

Abstract

And/or is a coordinator in English that has virtually never been remarked on in the syntactic literature on coordination. I present a new empirical survey of and/or, supported by naturally-occurring examples from several English corpora. I examine the basic distribution of and/or, and its interaction with collective predicates, relational modifiers with an internal reading, anaphors, ‘respectively’, semantic contradiction, quantifiers, and gapping with negation. Based on the distribution across corpora and its syntactic behavior, I argue that and/or is a completely lexicalized coordinator in productive use, and conclude that the constraints on the syntactic distribution of and/or are a union of the set of constraints on and and or.

Highlights

The syntactic literature on coordination in English typically discusses a select few coordinating conjunctions in detail: and, but, and or (e.g., Munn 1993, Zoerner 1995)
Newlyidentified English coordinators include focus-sensitive coordinators let alone and much less (Hulsey 2008), the intersective coordinator slash (Woo, to appear), and this paper proposes another: and/or
/or is a unique, lexicalized combination of and and or, combined by an orthographic slash . It is an established coordinator in English that shows systematic, regular, robust, and intentional use

Summary

Introduction

The syntactic literature on coordination in English typically discusses a select few coordinating conjunctions in detail: and, but, and or (e.g., Munn 1993, Zoerner 1995). It is an established coordinator in English that shows systematic, regular, robust, and intentional use. The only combination found is the exact translated equivalent of and/or, apparently excluding any alternatives like or/and, as in English. I consulted the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies 2008).

Results

Conclusion