Language Log

Almost a year ago, I posted here (well, at the old LL site) about a new peer-reviewed, open access journal affiliated with the Linguistic Society of America. The journal is called Semantics and Pragmatics (S&P), and I'm coeditor, together  with Kai von Fintel. The big news today is that we have published our first article, and it's a doozy – Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding, by Chris Barker and Chung-chieh Shan. To give Language Log readers a picture of some of what interests formal semanticists I'll fill you in with a little background on the paper – abstruse stuff, but it has applications. Then (and I hope you'll excuse the awkwardness of me slapping my own back, but who else is gonna do it?) I'll give you an update on how S&P is doing.

You're asked:

(1) Do you mind if I ask you a question?

How do you respond? There's a complexity here, no matter what your opinions about question-asking are. The problem is that (1) has the form of a yes-no question (about what the addressee's sensibilities are) but also conveys a request (for the addressee to allow the questioner to perform an action). An affirmative response to the yes-no question is a negative response to the request, and vice versa. Oh dear. (Actually, there's more.)

Hesitant though I am to take on still more uses of or (most recently discussed here) — this could quickly become an endless chain of fascinating data — here's one that at first is puzzling, until you figure out what people are trying to do with it. It came from Benjamin Massot, a French linguist currently living in Germany, who noticed signs like the following in lifts (or, as we say in American English, elevators):

French: capacité: 320kg ou 4 personnes

German: Tragfähigkeit: 320kg oder 4 Personen

In English, 320 kg or 4 persons. Massot tried at first to figure out who (the lift company or the users of the elevator) would be declared responsible in case of an accident, for various combinations of weights, numbers of people, and interpretations of or, but eventually concluded (correctly, I think) that in this context a limit of "320 kg or 4 persons" just meant 320 kg.

The saga of English or (last discussed on Language Log here) continues in my e-mail, with several pointers to literature (taking us away from traditional logic) and possibly relevant data.

In my posting on and/or, I gave an informal (but precise) account of what I take to be the semantics of expressions of the form X₁ or X₂ … or X_n, where or is understood exclusively: the disjunction is true if and only if exactly one X_i is true and the rest are false. (Compare the inclusive understanding, where the disjunction is true if and only if at least one X_i is true.) My inbox is now filling up with mail from people explaining to me that I'm wrong about the semantics of exclusive or. Well, actually, they're telling me that I'm wrong about the semantics of the binary logical connective of exclusive disjunction + (or however you want to represent this logical connective). I'm perfectly clear about the semantics of +, but that's not what I was talking about.

Language Log brings little surprises into my life — this week, the report by Geoff Pullum that there are people who believe that the English conjunction or is always understood exclusively (so that and/or and or both might be useful expressions to have around, to convey an inclusive reading).  Geoff countered with an argument that the meaning of or is in fact just inclusive disjunction, though the conjunction can be used to convey exclusivity via conversational implicature.  

The usage literature largely agrees with this position, and so and/or is widely (but not universally) reviled, as unnecessary. But there's more to the story.

Does and/or mean "and and or", or "and or or"? That is, if I say I am interested in A and/or B, do I mean I'm interested in A and B and I'm interested in A or B, or do I mean that I'm interested in A and B or I'm interested in A or B? (You may want to say that it means I'm interested in A and B and/or I'm interested in A or B; but in that case I repeat my question.)