The possibilities of the inclusive interpretation of disjunction in English and Hungarian

Abstract

This paper discusses the ambiguity of the disjunction operator "or" in English and "vagy" in Hungarian and investigates the contexts that allow these operators to be read inclusively by speakers. I draw upon linguistic findings of the past decades to present the theoretical background of disjunction interpretation in English and carry out a corpus research for Hungarian. The primary goal of the paper is to find out whether the relevant contexts for the two languages overlap or not and to discover how similar Hungarian is to English in this particular respect.