Exclusive Free Choice in Turkish

Abstract

In this paper, we will be concerned with a type of interpretation associated with ya…ya… disjunction in Turkish where the Free-Choice inference is obligatorily accompanied with the Prohibition inference. We claim that such a reading arises as a consequence of the fact that each disjunct inside ya…ya… disjunction is parsed with only (overt or covert). We show that the scalar nature of only, which we model as a restriction on alternatives, is crucial in accounting for the exclusive Free-Choice readings. We finally discuss some differences between only and the Exh operator