Dividing things up: The semantics of or and the modal/or interaction

@article{Simons2005DividingTU,
  title={Dividing things up: The semantics of or and the modal/or interaction},
  author={Mandy Simons},
  journal={Natural Language Semantics},
  year={2005},
  volume={13},
  pages={271-316}
}
  • M. Simons
  • Published 1 September 2005
  • Philosophy
  • Natural Language Semantics
In this paper, the meanings of sentences containing the word or and a modal verb are used to arrive at a novel account of the meaning of or coordinations. It is proposed that or coordinations denote sets whose members are the denotations of the disjuncts; and that the truth conditions of sentences containing or coordinations require the existence of some set made available by the semantic environment which can be ‘divided up’ in accordance with the disjuncts. The relevant notion of ‘dividing… 
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