Tracking Down Disjunction

Kuno (1973) and others describe the Japanese junctor ya as conjunction. But, Sudo (2014) analyzes ya as a disjunction with a conjunctive implicature. We compare ya with other junctors and implicature triggers experimental using mouse-tracking. Our two main results are: (1) ya differs from lexical conjunctions corroborating Sudo’s (2014) proposal. (2) The time-course of the conjunctive implicature of ya argues against the details of Sudo’s (2014) implementation, and instead favors an account similar to other cases of conjunctive implicatures.

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