Conceptio › Archive › PhilArchive
PhilArchive open access

Hungarian disjunctions and positive polarity

Szabolcsi, Anna · 2002
PhilArchive · Papers · 2002
Open Source ↗
philosophy
The de Morgan laws characterize how negation, conjunction, and disjunction interact with each other. They are fundamental in any semantics that bases itself on the propositional calculus/Boolean algebra. This paper is primarily concerned with the second law. In English, its validity is easy to demonstrate using linguistic examples. Consider the following: (3) Why is it so cold in here? We didn’t close the door or the window. The second sentence is ambiguous. It may mean that I suppose we did not close the door or did not close the window, but I am not sure which. This `I am not sure which’ reading is irrelevant to us because it has disjunction scoping over negation. But the sentence may equally well mean (and indeed this is the preferred reading) that we didn’t close the door and did not close the window. This `neither’ reading bears out de Morgan law (2).
Conceptio Open Archive

Analyze & explore related research in Conceptio

Connect this record directly into your research workflow or AI agent. Explore citations across open repositories, query full text, and export structured proof bundles.

This document is indexed with metadata only: full text is not available in the archive for this record. Open the official source ↗

Related documents

Record · ID 771936
Retrieved via Conceptio: every document is proof-bundled with source, license, and retrieval metadata.
Bring this data into your agent: Connect via MCP or API · 20 free credits to start · no card required
Read the Docs → · View CLI source on GitHub · Conceptio Open Knowledge Archive