Abstract
Hurford 1974 famously observed that a disjunction is generally infelicitous if one of the disjuncts entails the other. Several accounts of Hurford’s observation have been put forward in the literature, grounding the infelicity of the so-called “Hurford disjunctions” into various principles of language use. In this article, we investigate three variants of Hurford’s original cases and we show that none of the major explanatory approaches to “Hurford disjunctions” captures all at once Hurford’s original cases and our novel variants. We discuss the challenges raised by our data for existing approaches to informational oddness and, more broadly, for the descriptive generalization originally proposed by Hurford. EARLY ACCESS
Highlights
Consider the following minimal pairs:1(1) Hurford Disjunction (HD) vs. Quasi Hurford Disjunction (QHD) a. #John studied in Paris or in France. b
None of the explanatory approaches we are aware of can successfully account for HDs and their varieties, and it is unclear whether, and if so how, the principles underlying these approaches can be amended to capture the infelicity of HDs and Long-distance variants of HDs (LDHDs) while leaving QHDs out of their scope of application
We have shown that recent proposals suggesting to modify the level at which these principles would apply, or arguing for exhausti cation as a rescue strategy, do not o er a satisfying solution to the main challenges we identi ed: the resulting theories provide a general account for QHDs but lose the account of LDHDs
Summary
(1) Hurford Disjunction (HD) vs. Quasi Hurford Disjunction (QHD) a. #John studied in Paris or in France. b. We can note that, descriptively, these contrasts are in line with Hurford’s 1974 original observation that a disjunction is infelicitous if one of the disjuncts entails the other. This observation, which has come to be known as ‘Hurford’s Constraint’ (HC), is stated and further exempli ed in (3).. The sentence in (1-a) is predicted to be odd by HC for the rst disjunct contextually entails the second. HC descriptively captures the oddness of the (a)-sentences above and, subsequently, the observed contrasts with their (b)-variants.
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