SEMANTICS OF TO LI…TO LI DISJUNCTION IN RUSSIAN

There are several lexical items with disjunctive semantics that function as conjunctions in coordinated structures in Russian. While their core semantics is that of logical disjunction, they allow for a certain amount of variation in different aspects of their lexical meaning and inferences they give rise to.

This paper is about one of the many Russian disjunctions, to li…to li, its semantics, its inferences and its distribution. One characteristic feature of this disjunction (probably shared with ne to…ne to, but not with other disjunctions) is that it gives rise to obligatory ignorance inferences. The obligatoriness of these inferences explains some of to li...toli’s peculiar properties, like its incompatibility with “free choice” and distributive readings.

This paper provides an account of to li…to li in terms of the scope of disjunction. I argue that in the case of to li…to li, disjunction must scope immediately below the (often covert) epistemic operator, which is responsible for ignorance in the general case. In other disjunctions the scope of disjunction is not fixed that way, so that disjunction can scope below some other operators, thus giving rise to “free choice” and distributive readings.