‘Or’ cycles

The goal of this chapter is to argue that cyclic changes are relevant to ‘or’ con- structions too. We examined corpus data from English (mainly the SBC, Du Bois et al. 2000–2005, and LSAC), Italian (MIDIA corpus for the diachronic survey, D’Achille and Grossmann 2017; KIParla corpus for contemporary spoken Italian, Mauri et al. 2019), and Hebrew (HeTenTen). A selected number of ‘or’ constructions were analysed with respect to their context, their neutral or dedicated form, and the interpretations associated with the forms. Just as for negation, we here distinguish between neutral constructions (usable for any subfunction) and dedicated constructions, each specialized for some specific subfunction. For ‘or’ constructions we distinguish between two stances associated with the alternatives: symmetric and asymmetric stances. Conveying a symmetric stance, the speaker equally orients towards both alternatives, assigning each the same interactional status. Conveying an asymmetric stance, on the other hand, the speaker treats one of the alternatives as more likely true, or as more pivotal, or as favoured by them. Traditional analyses of natural language ‘or’ constructions have been influenced by the logical concept of disjunction, which is why they excluded asymmetric ‘or’ constructions from discussion. We see no reason for this exclusion, especially since, as we show in the paper, symmetric and asymmetric alternativity constructions share diachronic cycles.