Meaning Meeting - Yunhui Bai / Modal disjunctions
Meaning Meeting - Yunhui Bai / Modal disjunctions
Wednesday September 16, Yunhui leads the Meaning Meeting with a discussion of "Modal disjunctions," joint work with alum Caleb Kendrick.
Standard dynamic theories of disjunctions hold that the right disjunct has a local context that's global context updated with the negation of the left disjunct. But the patterns supporting the idea break down sometimes. This can be seen in the case in presupposition filtering:
(1) We can't build a stadium here, or the stadium will make the traffic bad. (No global presupposition)
Or when the or-to-if inference ("p or q" to "if not p, q") fails:
(2) John has to write a paper or he will get a C.
=\=>If he doesn't have to write a paper, he will get a C
==>If he doesn't write a paper, he will get a C.
We give a new account of local contexts in disjunctions that accounts for the above patterns.