Tracking down Disjunction

Uli Sauerland

ZAS Berlin

Abstract: Singh et al. (2015), Tieu et al. (2015), and Bowler (2014) argue that "A or B" can have a conjunctive implicature that "A and B" must hold in certain circumstances. I present a mousetracking study on the Japanese junctor "ya" that show that "ya" should be analyzed as disjunction with a conjunctive implicature (joint work with Ayaka Tamura, Jack Tomlinson, and Masatoshi Koizumi). I then discuss the puzzling difference between the two disjunctions "ka", which has the anti-conjunctive implicature (i.e. "A or B" implicates that "A and B" is false), and "ya", which has the opposite implicature.