Disjunction in comparatives

Cécile Meier

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt

The talk concerns constructions like "Papua New Guinea is smaller than Thailand or Spain". We discuss its ambiguity and evaluate current theories of disjunction against this construction. It will be shown that no version is able to capture what we call an indifference inference. In order for our sentence to be felicitous in one reading it seems to be mandatory that Thailand and Spain have the about the same size. We propose a modal analysis of the disjunction that lives on sets of alternatives.