Disjunction as a Positive Polarity Item The effect of prosody on the interpretation of Hungarian negated disjunctive sentences
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Abstract
Negated disjunctive sentences are potentially logically ambiguous: when disjunction takes wide scope (Disjunction Wide, DW) relative to negation, the “not one or not the other” interpretation emerges. Disjunction occurring in the direct scope of clausemate negation, however, results in the “neither” interpretation of the sentence (Disjunction Narrow, DN). Prior theoretical literature claims that in certain languages – including Hungarian – the DN interpretation seems to be missing, as in these languages disjunction is a Positive Polarity Item (PPI). On the basis of the theory of parametric cross-linguistic variation regarding disjunction (+/–PPI languages) many languages have been categorized as +PPI. However, in some of the languages originally claimed to be +PPI contradictory empirical results have emerged in recent empirical work regarding the +/–PPI status of disjunction. These contradictions raise the possibility that in addition to the +/–PPE status of a language's disjunction other, so far unstudied factors may play a role in the availability of the DN reading of negated disjunctive sentences.
In view of this our study aims to empirically investigate (i) the availability of the two possible scope readings of Hungarian negated disjunctive sentences, and (ii) the potential effect of sentence prosody on the availability of these interpretations. The judgments collected in our acceptability test show that although the DN reading is marked in Hungarian, it is far from unavailable. The results of our prosodic perception experiment indicate that prosody can have a significant effect on the availability of the two possible interpretations, and in a favorable prosodic condition, the DN reading is accepted by the speakers in almost half of the cases. This finding supports the significant role of prosody in the interpretation of negated disjunctive sentences, which has so far not yet been demonstrated in any language among adult speakers. The results of our study raise new research questions for the parametric PPI theory of disjunction.
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