[lingtalks] Mira Ariel Talk, Monday Feb 9 at 12pm

[Klinton Bicknell]

The UCSD Department of Cognitive Science is pleased to announce a talk  
by

Mira Ariel Ph.D.
Tel Aviv University

Monday, February 9, 2009 at 12pm
Cognitive Science Building, room 003


"Or, or something: Constructing categories on the fly"

Linguists (of all stripes) have taken the most salient feature of
disjunctions to be the distinct alternatives they seem to present.  
Here's
an example of a classical case:

                 STEPHANIE:      it was either Funniest Home Videos,
                                 or they were filming a fi- a movie,  
(SBC:
035).

Each disjunct presents a distinct alternative; the reading is exclusive
(the alternatives are incompatible with each other); no other relevant
alternatives are entertained by the speaker; and so, exactly one of the
alternatives must be true. But a search of the Santa Barbara Corpus of
Spoken American English reveals that such disjunctions are not so  
common in
natural conversations.

Instead, natural discourse manifests a whole variety of interpretations
associated with a number of different disjunctive constructions (and
sub-constructions). One of these constructions is X or something, often
used to create an ad hoc higher-level category, of which X is  
construed as
a salient member:

                 ALICE:          ... like if she had to go shopping or
something maybe you could
                                 go with her, (SBC: 007).

Most likely, shopping or something denotes a higher-level category of
activities similar to shopping. This ad hoc category is constructed  
using
the explicit 'shopping' as pivot. The category is crucially context- 
dependent.

But how significant is the function or something relative to the more
general pattern X or Y? The most dramatic finding of the present  
research
is that the meaning of the basic X or Y construction is not all that
different from the "special" X or something construction. I argue that  
very
often, only one general concept is proposed by the speaker, despite the
fact that two (or more) alternatives are mentioned explicitly. Consider:

                 GILBERT:        She got sick and tired of,
                                 ... you know,
                                 turning on the news,
                                 and seeing another ... corrupt man,
                                 or another,
                                 .. you know.
                                 .. another scandal breaking out.  
(SBC: 012).

My claim is that 'another corrupt man' and 'another scandal breaking  
out'
are to be interpreted as two exemplars of a higher-level category,
something like 'disturbing pieces of news involving corruption', and  
it is
that higher-level concept that the speaker is talking about.

All in all, I will criticize both the semantic and pragmatic standard
analyses of disjunctions. For pragmatics, I will present discourse  
counts
which show that standard assumptions about the use of disjunctions in
discourse are not borne out by the data. The classical semantic analysis
(an inclusive meaning, whereby at least one disjunct must be true) will
also be criticized. I will instead support a more minimalistic  
linguistic
analysis: By using a disjunction, speakers simply raise alternatives,  
but
do not commit themselves to even one of them. At the same time, I will
demonstrate that a whole array of enriched interpretations are  
associated
with the various disjunction constructions, and that quite often the two
(or more) disjuncts serve to create a single concept and a single  
discourse
entity. Across a wide range of cases, what unifies the use of or is the
construction of an ad hoc category on the fly.
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