Default biases in the interpretation of English negation, conjunction, and disjunction

Masoud Jasbi, Natlia Bermudez, & Kathryn Davidson*

Abstract. Previous research has hypothesized default interpretive biases for three
types of ambiguities with English logical words and, or, and not. First, disjunction
(A or B) is hypothesized to be biased towardtoward an exclusive interpretation in
upward-entailing environments and an inclusive interpretation in downward-entailing
environments (Levinson 2000, Chierchia 2004, Breheny et al. 2005). A negated dis-
junction (not A or B) is claimed to be biased toward a “neither-nor” interpretation (i.e.
wide scope negation: ¬[A _ B]) and a negated conjunction is said to be biased to-
ward an “either-not” interpretation (i.e. wide-scope negation: ¬[A ^ B]) (Szabolcsi
2002, Szabolcsi & Haddican 2004). We tested these hypotheses within the same ex-
perimental paradigm with 149 English-speaking participants and found disjunction
to be biased toward an inclusive interpretation across three different entailment envi-
ronments: episodic declaratives, questions, and conditional antecedents. Our results
also confirmed that English negated disjunction is biased toward a “neither-nor” (wide
scope negation) interpretation but the results did not show an “either-not” bias (wide
scope negation) for negated conjunction.
Keywords. implicature; disjunction; conjunction; negation; scope; psycholinguistics;
semantics; pragmatics

1. Introduction. Negation, conjunction, and disjunction have played important roles in shaping
current theories of semantics and pragmatics. For a long time connective words such as and,
or, not and their combinations were considered ambiguous and dissimilar to the semantics of the
logical operators in classical logic (Tarski 1941). However, Grice (1989) presented an alternative
theory in which connective words have meanings similar to their logical counterparts, and the
apparent ambiguities in their interpretations stem from factors extrinsic to the semantics of the
words themselves. We discuss three such ambiguities in this study.

First, linguistic disjunction is ambiguous between an “inclusive” and “exclusive” interpreta-
tion. A disjunctive statement “A or B” is inclusive if it is interpreted as “A or B or Both”, and
exclusive if it is interpreted as “A or B, not both”. For example “Abe is going to drink tea or
coffee” is exclusive if it communicates that he is not going to drink both, and inclusive if it com-
municates that he may drink both. In most current theories of formal semantics and pragmatics,
the meaning of or itself is represented by inclusive disjunction (A _ B), and the exclusive inter-
pretation is the result of a pragmatic enrichment called “scalar implicature”. In the neo-Gricean
approach (Horn 1972, Gazdar 1980, Levinson 2000), the exclusivity implicature follows logically
from three assumptions: 1. That the speaker is cooperative, truthful, informative, relevant, and
brief (The Gricean Maxims); 2. That the speaker could have used and instead (The Scalar Alter-
native); and 3. That the speaker is opinionated regarding whether the conjunction is true or not

*We would like to thank the organizers and reviewers of ELM 2. Authors: Masoud Jasbi, University of California
Davis (jasbi@ucdavis.edu) & Natalia Bermudez & Kathryn Davidson, Harvard University. Data and code for this
study is available at: https://github.com/natibermudez/Logic-cards

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(Opinionatedness). In upward entailing environments, the sentence with and is more informative
than the sentence with or, while in downward entailing environments this is reversed, so entailment
environments are predicted to play a role in whether or receives an exclusive or inclusive reading.

Although quite different, roughly the same prediction is made in the grammatical approach
(Chierchia 2004, Chierchia et al. 2012, Chierchia 2013), where the enrichment is the result of an
exhaustivity operator that can appear in various syntactic positions in a sentence’s Logical Form
(May 1985, Fox 2008). Here too, there is an expectation that structural factors will play a role in
interpretation: “the claim is that there are situations in which (standard) implicatures are by de-
fault present and situations in which they are by default absent, and such situations are defined by
structural factors. By default interpretation, I simply mean the one that most people would give in
circumstances in which the context is unbiased one way or the other” (Chierchia 2004). Entailment
environment is one such structural factor: scalar implicatures (e.g. the exclusivity implicature) are
present by default in upward entailing environments, but they are suspended in downward entailing
environments or environments that license NPIs such as antecedent of conditions, questions, and
the restriction of every. This approach predicts that the default interpretation of disjunction is “ex-
clusive” in upward entailing environments and “inclusive” in downward entailing environments.

Second, when negation (¬) and disjunction (_) co-occur in a sentence like “Abe doesn’t drink
tea or coffee”, the sentence can be interpreted in two ways. The first interpretation is a negative
disjunction (¬[A _ B]) which we call “the neither-nor interpretation”: “Abe drinks neither tea
nor coffee”. The second interpretation is the disjunction of negatives ([¬A _ ¬B]) which we call
“the either-not interpretation”: “Abe either doesn’t drink tea or doesn’t drink coffee; I don’t know
which.” Szabolcsi (2002) analyzed this ambiguity in terms of scope assignment, and argued that
different languages have different default interpretive biases regarding the scope of negation and
disjunction. She suggested that in some languages such as Hungarian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian,
Slovak, Polish, Italian, and Japanese the default interpretation is “either-not”. More specifically, in
these languages the disjunction words (e.g. the Hungarian vagy) are Positive Polarity Items (PPI)
and tend to be interpreted outside the scope of negation. In other languages such as English, Greek,
Romanian, Bulgarian, and Korean, the disjunction words are not PPIs and tend to be interpreted in
the scope of negation. Therefore, the default interpretation in these languages is “neither-nor”.

Third, when negation (¬) and conjunction (^) co-occur in a sentence like “Abe doesn’t drink
tea and coffee”, they can also be interpreted in two ways. The first interpretation is negative con-
junction (¬[A ^ B]) which is similar to when both is used with and: “Abe doesn’t drink both tea
and coffee. He drinks one or the other.” This interpretation is essentially the “either-not” interpre-
tation discussed before: “Abe either doesn’t drink tea or doesn’t drink coffee, or both”. The second
interpretation is the conjunction of negatives [¬A ^ ¬B]) which is equivalent to the “neither-nor”
interpretation: “Abe doesn’t drink tea and coffee; he drinks neither.” Szabolcsi & Haddican (2004)
proposed that “English disjunction and conjunction happily scope below a c-commanding nega-
tion and dutifully obey the de Morgan laws, whereas the Hungarian counterparts either must scope
above the c-commanding negation or fail to obey the de Morgan laws. Such contrasts are not re-
stricted to English and Hungarian. Similar to English is German; similar to Hungarian are Russian,
Serbian, Italian, and Japanese, among other languages”. More specifically, they argued that with
sentences, quantifiers, and predicates, negated conjunction has a default “either-not” bias.

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The claims regarding the three ambiguities and their default interpretive biases discussed
above are in nature probabilistic. It is easy to show that in each case, both interpretations exist
in some context in a given language as examples (1-3) show for English with (a) and (b) continu-
ations. At issue is whether in neutral contexts (i.e. contexts that do not bias the interpretation one
way or another), we can find a general bias toward one interpretation rather than another. There-
fore, while informal and intuition-based judgments can be helpful in forming working hypotheses,
a definitive assessment of such probabilistic and empirical claims requires careful psycholinguistic
experiments. The next section summarizes prior experimental research on these ambiguities.

(1) Abe drinks tea or coffee.
a. But not both. [A _ B]

b. And sometimes both. [A � B]

(2) Abe doesn’t drink tea and coffee.
a. He hates them both. [¬A ^ ¬B]

b. He likes only one of them, I forget which one. ¬[A ^ B]

(3) Abe doesn’t drink tea or coffee.
a. He hates them both. ¬[A _ B]

b. He likes only one of them, I forget which one. [¬A _ ¬B]

2. Previous Research. Previous experiments on the inclusive vs. exclusive bias for positive dis-
junction have had mixed results. Paris (1973) tested the comprehension of disjunction and other
linguistic connectives in children and college students using truth value judgments. In the adult
sample, cases of disjunction with or were interpreted as inclusive about 75% percent of the time
and those with either-or were inclusive about 67.5% of the time. In two experiments each with 24
participants, Evans & Newstead (1980) found that “either p or q” type rules are more likely inclu-
sive (52% of the time in experiment 1 and 57% of the time in experiment 2). On the other hand,
Braine & Rumain (1981) used both a give-object task and a truth-value-judgment task and found
that adults interpreted disjunction as exclusive most of the time in both experiments (91% and 73%
exclusive in the give-object task depending on the phrasing and 41% exclusive in the truth-value-
judgment task). Noveck et al. (2002) suggested that lower levels of exclusive interpretations in
earlier studies were due to higher task complexity. They collected truth-value judgments from 20
French-speaking adults on abstract logical arguments such as: “if there is a P then there is a Q and
an R; there is a P, therefore there is a Q or an R”. They reported that the majority of the participants
(75%) rejected such conclusions because they interpreted the disjunction as exclusive. However,
as the authors pointed out, the paradigm was not neutral and encouraged exclusivity implicatures
by highlighting the conjunction in the premise of the linguistic stimuli.

Chevallier et al. (2008) used a truth-value-judgment task with 59 French-speaking partici-
pants. Testing constructions like “there is an A or a B”, they found that the majority of the re-
sponses (about 75%) were inclusive. Davidson (2013) used a felicity-judgment task in which 12
English-speakers saw an image and were presented with a sentence like “a spoon is in the mug
or a spoon is in the bowl.” Participants responded by choosing a smily face or a frowny face to
indicate (dis)satisfaction with the linguistic description. The majority of responses (about 80%)

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showed dissatisfaction with a disjunction when both disjuncts were true which suggests an exclu-
sive interpretation. However, it is also possible that part of the dissatisfaction was due to ignorance
implicatures: an utterance of disjunction is odd when the speaker and the addressee already know
what is true. Jasbi & Frank (2021) tested children and adults’ comprehension of disjunction in
similar existential sentences to Chevallier et al. (2008) using binary and ternary forced-choice
truth-value judgments. In the binary task (wrong vs. right) the majority of participants provided
an inclusive interpretation (about 80%) but in the ternary task participants chose the intermediate
option of “kinda right” more often, which could be interpreted as exclusive. Jasbi et al. (2019)
varied the number of response options and replicated these findings showing that different rates
of exclusivity implicatures can also be due to different number of response options in the truth-
value-judgement task. Previous experiments have also reported that disjunction tends to be more
inclusive in downward-entailing environments (Noveck et al. 2002, Schwarz et al. 2007, Chemla
& Spector 2011).

Regarding the scope of negation and disjunction, Lungu et al. (2021) studied four languages
experimentally and reported that they did not support the PPI parameter hypothesis of disjunc-
tion (Szabolcsi 2002, Szabolcsi & Haddican 2004). They tested 30 French speakers, 43 Italian
speakers, 27 Romanian speakers and 37 English speakers. Participants read sentences with simple
negative disjunction (e.g. “Mary didn’t invite John or Suzi”) and had to judge their naturalness on a
7-point Likert scale. Each sentence had a narrow scope and a wide scope continuation (e.g. “She’s
upset with both of them” vs. “I don’t know which of them” respectively). In addition to negation,
they tested the effect of other anti-additive operators such as without, few, doubt, and rarely. They
found that in all four languages, disjunction exhibits PPI behavior to a certain degree. They con-
cluded that the narrow/wide scope of disjunction is never ruled out completely in a language, and
languages differ with respect to the degree to which a particular scope is dispreferred.

3. Current Study. This study builds on previous research and improves on it in multiple ways.
First, it is the first study to test the default biases in the interpretation of negation, conjunction,
and disjunction within the same experimental paradigm. Second, it uses a card selection task that
avoids metalinguistic truth-value judgments and their issues. Third, the paradigm avoids linguistic
scales (true vs. false, right vs. wrong) that are language dependent and potentially problematic
for a cross-linguistic investigation. Fourth, it avoids forced-choice responses and allows for a
wider range of responses and interpretations. Fifth, it also tests the effect of downward-entailing
environments on default interpretive biases for negation, conjunction, and disjunction. Sixth, the
paradigm is extremely simple and does not a-priori bias interpretations one way or another.

3.1. METHODS. The experiment was designed as a card selection task. Participants saw the same
six cards to choose from throughout the experiment (Figure 1). In each trial, they were presented
with a different sentence and were asked to select the cards that best matched it.

3.1.1. LINGUISTIC STIMULI. We used the words and, or, and not to create 14 logical construc-
tions in English. Seven constructions were experimental (Table 1) and seven constituted control
trial-types (Table 2). All constructions used have as the main verb and combined it with one or two
of the following nouns: cat, dog, or elephant. For experimental trials, we first considered simple
positive and negative constructions. These are constructions like has a cat (positive) or doesn’t

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Figure 1: Participants read a sentence prompt (e.g. which has a cat or a dog?) and selected among
the cards above.

Experimental Trial-Types Linguistic (Logical) Construction
Simple Positive has a [Noun]
Simple Negative doesn’t have a [Noun]
Simple Positive Disjunction has a [Noun1] or a [Noun2]
Complex Positive Disjunction has either a [Noun1] or a [Noun2]
Simple Negative Disjunction doesn’t have a [Noun1] or a [Noun2]
Complex Negative Disjunction doesn’t have either a [Noun1] or a [Noun2]
Simple Negative Conjunction doesn’t have a [Noun1] and [Noun2]

Table 1: English logical constructions used in the experimental trials. “Noun” was selected from
the set of “cat”, “dog”, or “elephant”.

have a cat (negative), which compose negation with a simple clause. They help us understand
to what extent speakers would interpret the clause exhaustively (e.g. “has only a cat”) vs. non-
exhaustively (e.g. “has a cat and possibly some other animal”), and what the effect of negation
would be on their meanings and exhaustification.

We also considered two types of positive disjunction constructions. One in which the nouns
are conjoined only by or (e.g. has a cat or a dog), and one in which they are conjoined by either as
well as or (e.g. has either a cat or dog). We call the first construction simple positive disjunction
and the second complex positive disjunction. We included the negative variants of both simple
and complex disjunction by simply negating the main verb have to doesn’t have. This way we
added two negative disjunction constructions: simple negative disjunction (e.g. doesn’t have a cat
or a dog) and complex negative disjunction (e.g. doesn’t have either a cat or a dog). Finally, we
included the simple negative conjunction construction in the experimental trials. Simple negative
conjunction was similar to simple negative disjunction, except that instead of the disjunction word
or we used the conjunction word and (e.g. doesn’t have a cat and a dog).

For control trials, we first added the word only to the simple positive trials (e.g. has only a
cat). We call these trials “exhaustive simple positive” and use them as controls for “simple posi-
tive” trials to capture exhaustive interpretations in our experimental paradigm. We also included
their negative versions for the sake of completeness (e.g. doesn’t have only a cat) and called them
“exhaustive simple negative” trials. We created “inclusive disjunction” trials by adding the phrase
or both to simple disjunction trials (e.g. has a cat or a dog or both). Exclusive disjunction trials
were created by adding not both to the simple disjunction construction (e.g. has a dog or an ele-

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Control Trial-Types Linguistic (Logical) Construction
Exhaustive Simple Positive has only a [Noun]
Exhaustive Simple Negative doesn’t have only a [Noun]
Inclusive Disjunction has a [Noun1] or [Noun2] or both
Exclusive Disjunction has a [Noun1] or [Noun2] not both
Complex Negative has neither [Noun1] nor a [Noun2]
Simple Positive Conjunction has a [Noun1] and [Noun2]
Complex Negative Conjunction doesn’t have both a [Noun1] and a [Noun2]

Table 2: English logical constructions used in control trials. “Noun” was selected from the set
“cat”, “dog”, and “elephant”.

Entailment Environment Construction Example
Question Which ... ... has a cat or a dog?
Positive Episodic Bob selected the card(s) which ... ... had a cat or a dog
Conditional Antecedent Select a card if ... ... it has a cat or a dog

Table 3: The three entailment environments tested in this study.

phant, not both). These control trials were used to determine when a simple or complex disjunction
trial was interpreted as inclusive or exclusive.

We created the “complex negative” and “complex negative conjunction” trial-types as controls
for negative disjunction and negative conjunction trial-types respectively. The complex negative
trial-type used the connective “neither-nor” (e.g. has neither a cat nor an elephant). This construc-
tion unambiguously selects for a reading in which both propositions are negated by a connective.
Complex negative conjunction trials used the word both in addition to negation and conjunction
(e.g. doesn’t have both a dog and an elephant). We hypothesized that this construction selects the
(wide scope) negation of conjunction in English (¬[A^B]). We used simple conjunction (e.g. has
a cat and a dog) as a control trial as well.

Finally, the control and experimental constructions were embedded in three types of entail-
ment environments: questions, conditional antecedents, and positive episodic statements (Table
3). Questions were formed using the question word which, for example which has a cat or a
dog?. Positive episodic statements were reports of actions taken by an imaginary character named
“Bob”, for example Bob selected the card(s) which had a cat or a dog) and participants were asked
to copy what the character (i.e. Bob) did. With conditionals, the logical construction was in the
antecedent and the consequent had the phrase select a card if ..., for example select a card if it has
a cat or a dog. This allowed us to experimentally manipulate the entailment environment of these
connectives and observe potential effects on the interpretation of the connectives.

3.1.2. PARTICIPANTS. We recruited 149 participants online via prolific.co. The study had a
between-subjects design for entailment environments; 50 participants saw the linguistic construc-
tions in questions, 50 in conditional antecedents and 49 in positive episodic declaratives (1 partici-
pant was excluded from the declarative environment for not finishing the task). In each entailment
environment, the study had a within-subjects design and all 50 or 49 participants saw all experi-

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Figure 2: The results for the control (left) and experimental (right) simple positive and negative
trials. The x-axis shows the proportion of responses and each color fill a selection of cards. The
y-axis shows different trial-types with an example utterance.

mental and control constructions. 95 participants reported that they had no prior training in logic.
101 participants were bilingual, 22 monolingual, and 25 multilingual.

3.1.3. PROCEDURE. The study had four blocks of questions: the practice block, the experimen-
tal block, the control block, and the debriefing block. At first, we asked participants two practice
questions. For example in the question environment we asked: 1. Which cards have only one
animal?, and 2. Which cards have two animals? Participants were asked to select among the six
cards shown in Figure 1. These trials helped participants understand the task and know that they
can select multiple cards. Next, we presented 21 experimental trials randomly (7 trial-types of
Table 1, 3 trials per trial-type). After the experimental block, participants saw 7 control trials (7
trial-types of Table 2, 1 trial per trial-type). The control block followed the experimental block
to avoid biasing participant responses. Seeing control trials like “cat or dog, or/not both” could
potentially bias participants to think more consciously about the inclusive and exclusive interpre-
tations of disjunction. Finally, we asked participants whether they were mono/bi/multi-lingual and
whether they had any prior training in formal logic. We hypothesized that multilingualism or prior
training in logic could affect participant responses.

3.2. RESULTS. Figure 2 shows the results for the control (left) and experimental (right) simple
positive and negative trials in the interrogative, conditional antecedent, and (positive episodic)
declarative environments. The left panels show positive exhaustive (e.g. has only a cat) and nega-
tive exhaustive control trials (e.g. doesn’t have only a cat). The right panels show simple positive

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Figure 3: Results for the control (left) and experimental (right) simple and complex positive dis-
junction trials. The x-axis shows the proportion of responses and each color fill a selection of
cards. The y-axis shows different trial-types with an example utterance.

(e.g. has a cat) and simple negative (doesn’t have a cat) experimental trials. The results for
experimental trials do not match exhaustive controls and instead reflect the basic semantics of sim-
ple positive and negative statements without pragmatic enrichment or exhaustification. Negative
exhaustive trials (e.g. doesn’t have only cat) were (at least) two way ambiguous in all environ-
ments: 1. presupposing the prejacent (e.g. has a cat) and asserting the existence of another animal
(e.g. dog or elephant); and 2. not presupposing the prejacent (e.g. selecting all cards except the
one with a single cat). The presuppositional interpretation was more prevalent in the (positive
episodic) declarative environment than the question or the conditional antecedent environments.
The presuppositional interpretation was more prevalent in the declarative environment but it was
not fully cancelled in the question and conditional antecedent environments either.

Figure 3 shows the results for the positive simple and complex disjunction trials for the inter-
rogative, conditional antecedent, and declarative environments. The left panels show the inclusive
(or both) and exclusive (not both) control trials and the right panels show the experimental tri-
als with simple (e.g. has a cat or a dog) and complex (e.g. has either a cat or a dog) trials.
Both the simple and complex instances of disjunction were more often (above 75%) inclusive
(orange color) than exclusive (green color), but not completely inclusive or exclusive. We used
a Bayesian mixed-effects logit model with random intercepts and slopes for participants and the
fixed effects of disjunction type (simple, complex, inclusive control, exclusive control), entail-
ment environment (question, conditional antecedent, and declarative), and their interaction. The
model predicted whether participants included the card with both animals in their selection (i.e.

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Figure 4: Results for the control (left) and experimental (right) simple and complex negative dis-
junction trials. The x-axis is the proportion of responses and each color fill a selection of cards.
The y-axis shows different trial-types with an example utterance.

had an inclusive interpretation)1. The model estimated a positive coefficient for inclusive control
disjunction trials compared to simple disjunction trials suggesting that simple disjunction was not
completely inclusive (� = 12.00, 95%CI = [3.60, 24.31]) However, a negative coefficient was
estimated for exclusive control disjunction compared to simple disjunction suggesting that simple
disjunction was not completely exclusive either (� = �15.56, 95%CI = [�27.45,�7.93]). The
rate of exclusive interpretations did not differ between simple and complex disjunction or between
the different entailment environments (positive episodic declarative vs. question vs. conditionals).
In all these cases the 95% credible intervals for the relevant coefficients contained zero.

Figure 4 shows the results for the negative simple and complex disjunction trials in each lin-
guistic environment. The left panels show the control “neither-nor” (e.g. has neither a cat nor
a dog) and “either-not” (e.g. doesn’t have both a cat and a dog) interpretations. The right panel
shows the experimental trials for simple negative disjunction (e.g. doesn’t have a cat or a dog)
and complex negative disjunction (e.g. doesn’t have either a cat or a dog). The vast majority
of responses in both experimental trials received a “neither-nor” interpretation in all three lin-
guistic environments (blue color). We ran a similar Bayesian mixed-effects model as in positive
disjunction trials, this time predicting the participants’ choice of the “neither-nor” interpretation
over other interpretations. The model did not find a difference between negative simple disjunc-
tion, negative complex disjunction, and the control “neither-nor” trial-type, since the 95% cred-

1All our Bayesian models used 4 chains, each with 4000 iterations and 2000 as warm-up. For all reported models
the chains converged and it was the case that R̂ = 1.

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Figure 5: Results for the control (left) and experimental (right) negative conjunction trial-type.
The x-axis is the proportion of responses, each color fill a selection of cards. The y-axis shows
different trial-types with an example utterance.

ible intervals for the relevant coefficients contained zero. However, for the “either-not” control
trial-type (e.g. doesn’t have both a cat and a dog) the model estimated a negative coefficient,
suggesting that participants chose the “neither-nor” interpretation less often in these control trials
(� = �17.60, 95%CI = [�27.02,�11.34]).

Finally, Figure 5 shows the results for positive and negative conjunction trials in each linguis-
tic environment. The left panels show the control “neither-nor” and “either-not” interpretations
again, as well as the positive conjunction trials (e.g. has a cat and a dog). The right panels show
the negative conjunction (e.g. doesn’t have a cat and a dog) trials. The negative conjunction
trials show a clear pattern of ambiguity in all three linguistic environments between the “neither-
nor” (blue color) and the “either-not” interpretations (beige color). We ran a similar Bayesian
mixed-effects model as before to predict participant choices of “neither-nor” interpretations for
negative conjunction trials. The model estimated a positive coefficient for the “neither-nor” con-
trol trial-type (� = 13.01, 95%CI = [7.17, 21.54]) and a negative coefficient for the “either-not”
control trial-type (� = �8.20, 95%CI = [�19.10,�2.51]). This suggests that participant inter-
pretations of negative conjunction was somewhere between the “neither-nor” and the “either-not”
interpretations. The proportion of these interpretations did not vary between different linguistic
environments, since the 95% credible intervals for the relevant coefficients contained zero. As ex-
pected, participants provided consistent responses to the the positive conjunction trials by choosing
the card with both mentioned animals (e.g. cat and dog). We also tested possible effects of mul-

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tilingualism and prior logical training on participant judgments and did not find any effect on the
comparisons of interest reported above.

4. Discussion. This study tested three hypotheses regarding the proposed default biases in the
interpretation of the English logical words and, or, and not. First, a disjunction can be interpreted
inclusively or exclusively, and most theories of scalar implicature have suggested that disjunction
is biased toward the exclusive interpretation in upward-entailing environments and the inclusive
interpretation in downward-entailing environments (Levinson 2000, Chierchia 2004, Breheny et al.
2005). However, this study found that participant interpretations of simple and complex disjunction
were biased toward an inclusive interpretation, regardless of the entailment environment.

Second, a negated disjunction can be interpreted with the negation scoping above the disjunc-
tion (¬[A _ B]) or vice versa ([¬A _ ¬B]). Previous research had hypothesized that English is
biased toward wide scope negation with disjunction (¬[A _ B]) or the “neither-nor” interpretation
(Szabolcsi 2002). Our study confirmed this hypothesis by finding a strong interpretive bias toward
the “neither-nor” interpretation in all entailment environments. Third, a negated conjunction can
be interpreted with negation scoping above the conjunction (¬[A^B]) or vice versa ([¬A^¬B]),
and previous research had suggested that in English wide scope negation or the “either-not” in-
terpretation is preferred (Szabolcsi & Haddican 2004). The results, however, did not show such a
preference and the responses were split between the two interpretations. The entailment environ-
ment did not affect the scope of negation with conjunction and disjunction either.

Why did entailment environment not affect the proportion of exclusivity implicatures as pre-
dicted? One possibility is that the task failed to properly manipulate the entailment environment
and participants largely ignored it. However, such an explanation predicts that there should be no
effect of the entailment environment in this study. This is not the case. The rate of presuppositional
interpretations for negative exhaustive trials are affected. The exhaustivity of the disjuncts in the
control trials of disjunction is also affected. Therefore, participants did not ignore the entailment
environment altogether. A second possibility is that assuming an independent and default effect of
entailment environment on pragmatic implicatures is too strong. Entailment environments can and
do affect pragmatic implicatures but if only certain other pragmatic or contextual factors are also
met. It is possible that different aspects of our experimental setup such as the choice of the main
verb have or the task of selecting a group of cards itself has made the entailment environment a
less relevant factor for the purpose of implicature computation.

Finally, this study does not take into account the role of prosody and intonation. It is possible
to resolve the ambiguities discussed here using special intonation or at least bias the interpretation
one way or another. For the design of this study we had deliberately set aside the issue of prosody
to investigate it separately, and after we have a good understanding of how different logical con-
structions in our study are interpreted when prosody is not explicitly manipulated. Therefore,
prosody remains a possible confound that we intend to address in future studies. We also plan to
expand this paradigm to languages other than English - such as Hungarian and Mandarin Chinese
- with rich literature on logical words.

Proceedings of ELM 2: 129-141, 2023

Masoud Jasbi, Natlia Bermudez and Kathryn Davidson:
Default biases in the interpretation of English negation, conjunction, and disjunction. 139

https://doi.org/10.3765/elm
https://www.elm-conference.net/


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Proceedings of ELM 2: 129-141, 2023

Masoud Jasbi, Natlia Bermudez and Kathryn Davidson:
Default biases in the interpretation of English negation, conjunction, and disjunction. 141

https://doi.org/10.3765/elm
https://www.elm-conference.net/