Study on the interaction of disjunction and conjunction

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 22520393
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Ochanomizu University
• Principal Investigator: ITO Satomi お茶の水女子大学, 大学院人間文化創成化学研究科, 准教授 (60347127)
• Project Period (FY): 2010-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 意味論 / 統語論 / 類型論 / 中国語 / フィンランド語 / エジプトアラビア語

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This study investigates the alternation of disjunction and conjunction cross-linguistically and proposes a new logical structure for disjunctions in interrogative contexts. In the field of logic, it is well known that the negation of a disjunction is the conjunction of the negations (De Morgan’s law). This law also applies in natural languages, but does not apply if we replace the negation with an interrogative, although both negation and interrogative belong to the same category, that is, sentential operators. Hence, researchers in the field of linguistics distinguish interrogative “or” from declarative “or” to analyze disjunctions in natural languages. In this study, I investigate Mandarin Chinese, Finnish, and Egyptian Arabic, all of which have different connectives for declaratives and interrogatives respectively, and propose a unified analysis of disjunctions across languages.

Free Research Field

言語学