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Article published In: Language and Linguistics
Vol. 18:2 (2017) ► pp.269–295

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Processing conjunctive entailment of disjunction

 | National Cheng Kung University
 | National Cheng Kung University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 10 April 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.18.2.05liu
Abstract
In a sentence where the disjunction huo ‘or’ appears under the negation mei ‘no’ (e.g.: Ta mei chi qingjiao huo qiezi. ‘He did not eat green peppers or eggplants.’), the sentence is globally ambiguous between the conjunctive interpretation and the disjunctive interpretation. The primary goal of this study is to investigate if there is a default meaning for simple negative statements containing huo ‘or’. Data collected from the self-paced region-by-region reading experiment indicated that the participants consistently preferred the conjunctive interpretation. Additionally, in the conjunction-biased condition where the sentences turned out to favor the disjunctive interpretations at the end, there was reading time penalty at the last region of the sentences and participants spent significantly longer time judging the appropriateness of those sentences. Contrary to Jing, Chunyuan. 2008. Pragmatic Computation in Language Acquisition: Evidence from Disjunction and Conjunction in Negative Context. College Park: University of Maryland dissertation.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar assertion that both disjunction and conjunction readings are equally prominent in an out-of-the-blue context, the results from the quantitative data revealed that the conjunction reading is the default meaning for simple negative statements containing huo ‘or’. The findings of the current experiment provide essential implications to the study of child language acquisition. Specifically, we argue that understanding the adults’ linguistic patterns is a prerequisite to the study of children’s language acquisition patterns.
Article outline
  • 1.The backdrop
    • 1.1The downward entailing ‘or’
    • 1.2Previous investigation on ‘or’
    • 1.3The role of quantitative methods in linguistics
    • 1.4The present study
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Design and materials
    • 2.3Procedure
    • 2.4Data treatment
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Accuracy rate
    • 3.2Reading time
    • 3.3Conjunction or disjunction?
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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2022. A diszjunkció mint Pozitív Polaritású Elem. Jelentés és Nyelvhasználat 9:1 ► pp. 185 ff. DOI logo
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2019. Comprehending conjunctive entailment of disjunction among individuals with Asperger syndrome. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

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