Accessibility among Situations : Pragmatics of Disjunction in Japanese

Disjunctive expressions in Japanese coordinated with "ka" get either "or"-reading or "and"-reading depending on the situations in which the utterance takes place. This is comparable to some extent to the English counterparts with "or". In this paper, we will examine some cases where the same string of words gets different readings depending on the situations involved. We argue that the differences in interpretation emerge from the differences in accessibility among situations associated with the utterance. Pragmatically, our observation that a given disjunctive expression gets either "or"-reading or "and"-reading in a given situation reflects that only one of those readings can make the expression under consideration informative enough in that particular utterance situation.