Either in Unbalanced Disjunctive Sentences

This paper investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of the either...or... construction and presents its formalization within the Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) framework. More specifically, I examine how the two traditional syntactic assumptions, the Symmetry Condition and the Left Bracket Thesis, contribute to the formalization of the either...or... construction, and how the so-called wide scope or reading arises from the either... or... construction. I argue that syntactic treatments such as type raising cannot correctly capture the wide scope or reading, and propose a lexicalist approach in which either functions as a type of the operator which indicates a disjunctive scope.