The irreality of alternatives: towards a typology of disjunction

This paper investigates the variety of morphosyntactic strategies that languages use to encode the relation of alternative among states of affairs. A semantic definition of disjunction will be given, based on the notion of alternative meaning proposed by Dik 1968. After defining the functional domain under investigation, it will be shown that languages encode the notion of alternative between states of affairs in different but non-random ways. Specifically, many languages do not have a disjunctive connective, but rather encode the concept of “alternative" by means of the same strategies used for other irrealis domains, such as dubitative, hypothetical or interrogative. Two main implicational patterns will be identified, which will prove irreality to be a basic aspect of disjunction.