UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the semantics and pragmatics of disjunction and indefinites in Tiwa, an understudied Tibeto-Burman language of northeast India. The core focus of the dissertation concerns cross-linguistic variation and its implications for semantic theory. Broadly, I address the extent to which languages encode similar meanings through the same semantic means; what mechanisms are best suited to model those meanings; and how the theory can best model what cross-linguistic variation we do find. Concretely, I provide novel cross-linguistic evidence from phrasal comparatives that disjunction is alternative-denoting, and argue that languages can employ different semantic mechanisms in deriving exceptional wide scope.

Tiwa's large system of indefinites and disjunction particles, which are in part morphologically related, provide an ideal subject for exploring the logical connection between disjunction and indefinites (which amount to existential quantification over explicit and non-explicit domains respectively). While cross-linguistic studies of indefinites have seen an increase in recent years, disjunction has not received the same level of attention. In this dissertation, I provide a detailed description of the semantic and pragmatic behavior of Tiwa's various disjunction particles and their related indefinites, which, among other things, explicitly encode scope. Additionally, the dissertation contains a broader sketch of Tiwa grammar as a whole, which provides documentation and formal description of many aspects of the language. This empirical contribution is the result of original fieldwork in Assam, India, over the course of four years.