Talk by Anke Himmelreich (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium

In this talk, I will present ideas and an outline of my planned project on the structure of disjunction. The project should have two general areas that together aim for developing a more comprehensive understanding of the morphosyntax of disjunctive structures. The first area targets agreement with disjunctive noun phrases. In this area, the goal is to see how agreement with disjunctions works and whether or not we see differences to agreement with conjunctions. For this, a large cross-linguistic study is planned to achieve a broader database for the theoretical investigation in the second part: Here, the goal is to tie in the findings of the first part with state-of-the-art theories of agreement and coordination to investigate the general structure of disjunctions and whether it is different from conjunctions. The most important question here is whether disjunction shows a different tendency for clausal coordination vs. phrasal coordination than conjunction. For this, the agreement data will be combined with classic structural tests such as tests for movement, ellipsis as well as scope. The main goal is to get a deeper understanding of disjunctive structures in particular and coordinative structures in general.